Maintenance Work Process

To achieve Total Enterprise Asset Management – a company has to focus on the maintenance and reliability work processes. Vesta can help companies review and improve work practices – whether they use SAP as the EAM software or not. We often work with companies on an Enterprise Asset Management strategy before a final software decision has been made.

A key part of work process is an assessment of the current maintenance and reliability work processes. The assessment reviews the current state of the maintenance organization and compares it to recognized "Best Practices". During this process, the "as-is" condition for the current maintenance and reliability organization is established by examining the following areas:

• Preventive Maintenance
• Inventory and Purchasing
• Maintenance Workflows
• CMMS/EAM Utilization
• Operations Involvement
• Predictive Maintenance
• Reliability Practices, including RCM
• Total Productive Maintenance
• Financial Optimization
• Continuous Improvement Activities

The assessment helps to determine business requirements for a change. This is the primary driver for any VTEAM initiative. Unless the VTEAM initiative is tied to improving the overall competitive position of a company, it will not be successful. By clearly showing the business requirements for change, the financial drivers for the VTEAM initiative are clearly identified and quantified. This allows for the return on investment for the VTEAM initiative to be clearly identified and then tracked.

The following graphic highlights some of the key areas we focus on in the work process improvement area.

Develop Preventive Maintenance Program

This step is designed to provide stability to the maintenance and operations departments by reducing the percentage of reactive or fire-fighting activities that the organizations engage in during a production cycle. The goal is to design a preventive maintenance program that will eventually reduce the amount of reactive work to less than 20% of the total maintenance activities. While these activities will be reevaluated later in phase 2 activities, it is essential that a robust Preventive Maintenance program be developed as a foundation. As the less than 20% reactive resource deployment goal is achieved, the next steps in the V-Team development can begin.

Develop Stores Program

This step is designed to develop a disciplined stores and procurement function that has the capability to support planned and scheduled maintenance. Once the amount of reactive maintenance activities are less than 20%, this will allow for the proper use of controlled stores and procurement processes, thereby reducing maintenance materials costs. The goal to support maintenance planning and scheduling is to provide a service level of 95 to 97%.

Implement Work Order System

This step is designed to provide the disciplined approach to data collection and analysis necessary for planning and scheduling maintenance activities. With the reactive work at a low level and a high service level from the stores process, the organization has the time to develop a focus on data collection. The goal of this step is that 100% of all maintenance activities, including reactive work, must be recorded on a work order and linked to specific equipment. This level of discipline will insure that the data is available for trending all maintenance work.

Implement Planned and Scheduled Maintenance

This step is designed to focus on planning maintenance work activities. This insures that the correct resources, such as maintenance technicians, spare parts, contractors, etc. are determined in advance to insure that there are no work delays while the work is being performed. The performance measurement for planning is to insure that all work activities are completed within plus or minus 10% of the estimates. In addition, this step focuses on the scheduling of all planned maintenance work activities. This insures proper coordination with production and maintenance schedules, which improves the utilization of the personnel in both organizations. In addition, the coordinated scheduling will begin to optimize the utilization of the company assets. The goal is to have a schedule compliance of 90 to 95% on a weekly basis. There are other steps of the VTEAM work process that can also be provided as needed by customers. More details can be provided after an assessment and review with a customer.