Your asset strategy tips for improving performance

Reducing operating and maintenance costs. PHOTO: FOTOLIA

Good maintenance is all about performing it well and striving for excellence. It’s not always easy, and there are pitfalls. Two sessions presented at a MainTrain maintenance, reliability and asset management conference, presented by the Plant Engineering and Maintenance Association of Canada (PEMAC), offered concise tips for improving asset performance.

1. Follow the strategy. John Ballentine – a maintenance strategy expert and the engineering manager for North America at global consulting firm ARMS Reliability, said a properly executed strategy removes inconsistent outcomes, allows for the deployment of excellence, and drives continuous reliability improvement. It’s quick and easy to deploy; changes and updates strategies; clones strategies across multiple sites; provides visibility and governance of operating context changes; leverages pockets of reliability excellence; and it improves accuracy, productivity and efficiency.

2. Understand the process. Ballentine said a plant maintenance manager understands the total reliability process and roadmap, ensures blocks of work are well defined for a total approach, establishes goals for individual levels, cultivates learning and growth, requires training and adherence to the plan, and captures the lessons learned.

Takeaways include:

• separating strategy management from work management;

• leveraging pockets of excellence;

• deploying the best strategy to all assets all the time;

• enabling continuous learning by managing change; and

• good data begins with good engineering, reliability and CMMS partnership.

3. Deliver predictable performance. Christer Idhammar, founder and vice-president of reliability and maintenance management firm IDCON Inc. in Raleigh, NC, said reliability engineers are often thrown into situations where they may have theoretical knowledge from college but little practical experience.

The answer is to focus on managing existing equipment and to get involved in new equipment design and procurement.

Having an effective asset strategy management process and adhering to it will reduce risk, failures and downtime, all while tallying cost savings.