Planning your next Breakdown?

The computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) market will exceed £8.5million by the year 2001 and currently totals nearly £420million, acording to estimates by International Data Corporation (IDC) and Automation Research Corporation. The growth of the maintenance management market is outpacing that of the overall software market, driven by a highly competitive business environment seeking greater efficiency through cost control, elimination of unplanned downtime, migration to client/server solutions and packaged third-party software, and maintenance workforce automation.

As Allan Gleeson, Ross Systems consultant writes, organisations are increasingly viewing software that provides added efficiency as a strategic business investment. Having maintenance management fully integrated as a key component of enterprise resource planning (ERP) provides tangible benefits to organisations in the process industries. For example, if a manufacturing schedule requires a production run, yet the equipment requires proactive maintenance, the system can give management ample warning to make informed decisions accordingly.

It is also of great benefit to use the same systems and procedures for purchasing, asset management, financial management and inventory management throughout the entire business. In fact, maintenance management investments contribute five of the top eleven supply chain investment drivers, according to a survey by AMR/Logistics Management.

Of course it is essential that the maintenance system is fully functional and has features which facilitate `best-in-class' techniques. These would typically include the following features.

Preventive maintenance triggers, providing the ability to receive, manage and trend data points to start maintenance activities based on asset and process operational values. These multiple preventive maintenance triggers give organisations the ability to improve management of preventive maintenance activities.

Moving average Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and Mean Time Between Repairs (MTBR) provides and maintains MTBF and MTBR calculations for each asset with the ability to recalculate at the completion of each work order. These calculations allow organisations to be more proactive in maintenance management, thereby ensuring greater predictability and effectiveness.

Stockholding and purchasing gives the company full visibility across the enterprise of all its stock, with the ability to identify common items and minimise the actual stock and its costs.

EMU/Euro Support is for global companies or companies operating in Europe, providing them with the ability to utilise the new currency in daily transactions such as work orders and purchase orders.

Many enterprises miss major opportunities by mixing business systems with various levels of incompatibility. The goal of a maintenance department is to provide maximum asset availability at the lowest possible cost. Without tight integration of all information system components, strategic information from one system is never fed to the other system. The result is that maintenance is driven more towards reactive work, invariably incurring higher costs than if repairs were initiated earlier.

By implementing an integrated maintenance system, as part of an ERP system, organisations can gain many advantages ranging from one time data entry, information retrieval, reduction in transcription errors, but most importantly greater asset utilisation. The benefits of sharing a single system ensure the organisation works to a single plan with all departments co-operating.

Adopting integrated maintenance management gives information on managing the many and varied assets that are subject to legislation. These assets, such as slings, pressure vessels, tanks and lifting equipment, are legally required to have periodic checks to comply with the law and in many cases can cause the shut-down of a plant if not kept up to standard.

Rob Bloom, v-p of CMMSs provider PSDI, opines: While planning and management once functioned as the core of most computerised maintenance management solutions, an increased emphasis on regulation has switched the focus of asset management to the activities and operations performed in the field and on the shop floor.

Procedure compliance and data collection applications streamline and consolidate the compliance aspect of the activities in a paperless environment. This uniformity and accessibility of data is pivotal in industries in which safety regulations and procedural compliance are crucial to daily operations. They must provide a seamless connection between maintenance personnel and enterprise asset and process management systems. These applications put the power and the knowledge of the CMMS into the hands - literally - of personnel responsible for maintenance activities.

Built-in logic directs maintenance workers through tasks with step by step instructions and mandatory checklists. Work order status provides up to the moment information on the status of orders and the steps needed to close out the work orders. These real time, on site prompting features to ensure procedures are performed regardless of the employee, facility or location.

This enterprise-wide control helps to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, and to establish work processes that result in smoother, more efficient operations.

Another important area is automating every aspect of a plant or facility's equipment monitoring. Similar to an interactive clipboard, the application enables plant operators to take regular readings of plant equipment and record those readings on handheld devices.

Maintenance workers can collect a full range of readings, including pressure, temperature, voltage and current used to update the database. Information gathered during inspection automatically modifies the appropriate conditioning monitoring tables.

The application also gives operators the ability to capture, transmit, and record data for future field analysis and predictive or preventative maintenance.

Exxon Chemicals manufactures 76,000 tonnes of synthetic rubber annually. Firm IT control has to be exercised over maintenance resources - a task that Exxon Chemicals in Fawley gave to Primavera project management software, supplied and installed by ForgeTrack of Hertford.

Convention might dictate that equipment servicing is looked after by a CMMS. However, while these systems prove capable of tracking regular, recurring actions, they are not necessarily the best suited to major process plant `outages' like shutdowns, where a huge number of activities have to be undertaken in a concentrated period, claims ForgeTrack.

ForgeTrack md Chris Loxley-Ford says: `a CMMS is designed to build up an information database on aspects such as plant history and spares usage, data that are later used to determine replacement or refurbishment actions. For shutdown planning, users of such software are at the mercy of the planning capabilities available.'

Shutdowns, he argues, are better handled by project management software because they have an objective to achieve, a defined start and finish point, a set of activities to be accomplished, quality standards to attain, and finite funds and resources.

`Project management software not only enables a company to plan and control maintenance work. It also measures and reports back to senior management on the progress made against the original objective,' adds Loxley-Ford. PE

{{Business issues driven by supply chain investments

Improve customer serviceImprove order management 3Corporate growthImprove asset use 3Improve demand planningImprove distribution activities 3Accelerate 'cash-to-cash' cycleSupplier/supply base management 3Year 2000 issuesStrengthen partnershipsRegulatory compliance 3

Source: AMR/Logistics Management}}

{{Features your maintenance management software solutioncould and should have

* Access to past maintenance data* Ability to generate real-time work orders* Enterprise wide, cross platform, quality, data support* On-line equipment status tracking* Shutdown and turnaround management tracking* Detailed location information* Dual verification, and point of performance information access* Point of performance adjustments}}