Breakdowns of industrial machinery cost industry billions each year, with most of the cost resulting from lost production time while unscheduled repairs or maintenance are performed. Motivated companies are netting billions industry wide with uptime technology and mindsets, finds The Manufacturer.com‘s Pam Derringer.

Production vs. maintenance? Production vs. maintenance? Faced with the choice of running full tilt or halting for scheduled upkeep, plant managers typically have the upper hand over their maintenance colleagues and opt for production. But the latter can be a costly choice.

“You’re downsized but you have to do it cheaper, faster and turn it around on a dime,” says Jane Biddle, vice president of Aberdeen Group. “It’s a lot tougher to be in manufacturing and have happy shareholders now.” In the last five to eight years, the increase in global competition and growing adoption of lean and six sigma programs has created greater awareness that optimized production pays big dividends in output and quality. But not nearly fast enough.

Biddle, who authored a recent report on manufacturing asset management, said maintenance generally lags behind other areas in adoption of technology. “Too many are still in the break/fix mode,” she says. Yet break/fix is a costly option, reducing Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE = product quality, output and machine availability) to 50 to 85 percent of capacity. Best-in-class companies, in contrast, maintain OEE ratios at or exceeding 95 percent. The difference falls right to the bottom line.

Ironically, there are a lot of high-tech tools: smart sensors on automated controls, remote monitoring systems (Axeda, for example), and sophisticated software applications (OsiSoft, ActivPlant, Acumence, among others) that can detect and diagnose problems – even remotely – or generate repair orders directly into SAP. Many applications have alerts to pinpoint problems and dashboards that help managers work off the same set of production numbers. Other specialized machines monitor key operation indicators such as abnormal hot spots, lubrication problems, excess vibration or air leaks.

In fact, a stream of new sensing, diagnostic and analysis tools such as online or self-operating vibration sensors are coming to market that make optimized maintenance even easier, according to the Aberdeen report. The challenge, Biddle says, is to motivate companies into action.

The first step: to move from break-and-fix mode to preventive maintenance at specified time intervals or usage rates. Secondly, advance from preventive to predictive maintenance, anticipating problems before they occur. Thirdly, develop a holistic approach that extends plant wide or even enterprise wide where the optimization of all production resources is considered as a whole by a collaborative, cross-departmental and cross-functional team on a regular basis, she says.

The top roadblocks to optimized maintenance identified by Aberdeen survey respondents are, in order of magnitude:

• creating a culture of change from passive to proactive maintenance;
• updating operators and maintenance technicians with the expertise to run the latest computerized monitoring tools and equipment;
• establishing incentives for interdepartmental collaboration, and
• developing and following a clear asset management strategy.

“There is no one size fits all,” Biddle says. “There can be a combination of different tools and programs, but there needs to be teams of people looking at equipment and evaluating what is best.”

A key step is the creation of a collaborative environment so that insights are not isolated to one department but are shared and adopted as best practices companywide, she adds.

One option for breaking through these obstacles is to hire an outsourced maintenance service such as Advanced Technology Services (ATS), which offers expensive, specialized diagnostic equipment, trained operators and its own software to pinpoint and address production problems, according to Rick Travis, vice president of operations. Side by side with in-house employees, ATS forms cross-functional teams which work to identify, prioritize and address inefficiencies, starting with the most critical bottlenecks and working down the list, he says.

The key to optimized maintenance is establishing and following a consistent business process, says Travis, which includes planning, setting goals, measuring defects and cutting cycle time.

Companies also benefit from rotating, periodic use of ATS’ specialized diagnostic equipment that is too expensive to own or operate individually. In addition, ATS shares best practices with its customers and even has facilities in Detroit and Peoria, IL, for repair of customers’ failing mechanical components.
The result: more production, fewer defects and even a more motivated workforce. “Better maintained machines can result in 10 percent more running time and higher quality, resulting in up to 30 percent more product,” Travis says. “When machines run better, the operators are really happy. When they see the results, it wins them over.”

Procter & Gamble developed its own production optimization methodology that goes beyond traditional maintenance to high-end engineering with an uptime vs. downtime focus. This according to Mike Powers and Mark Burrell, associate directors of external business development and product supply, respectively. Called simply P&G’s reliability engineering technology, it assesses the inter-workings of entire assemblies and looks for key points of system failure instead of focusing on the operation of individual devices.

P&G’s reliability engineering technology was developed in the mid-90s in collaboration with the Los Alamos National Laboratory and since then has saved the corporation billions of dollars worldwide in improved efficiency, cost savings and avoided capital expenditures. In May, the Federal Laboratory Consortium selected the partnership as one of the best examples of technology transfer from a federal lab to a commercial marketplace.

The technology uses a sophisticated toolbox including software, best practices and an advanced statistical modeling of its production lines developed at Los Alamos to pinpoint the critical failure points by examining the highest frequency of failures and the length of time between stoppages. (Hint No. 1: The key failure points aren’t necessarily the biggest or most expensive to fix. Hint No. 2: Sometimes it’s better to just keep going if a routine maintenance results in high failure spikes after resumption.)

“Pieces of equipment linked together in a production system behave differently collectively than individually,” says Burrell. “To understand how a line fails versus a component requires a different set of tools…and that’s what makes our solution unique.”

Even the company culture has been modified, with operators now encouraged to work with an uptime mindset and to strive for longer runs between stoppages, Powers says. Higher reliability has paid measurable dividends, reducing the number of P&G lines from 12 to 10 and cutting capital expenses as a percentage of net outside sales from eight to four percent, Powers and Burrell say. Procter & Gamble is licensing its technology to other companies. The system is also available through BearingPoint Consulting as PowerFactoRE.

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Republished with permission from “Think uptime, have uptime,” July 10, 2006, by Pam Derringer at The Manufacturer.com.