"For a Design Mistake, there will always be a Maintainer correcting it."

Abstract: For the maintainer, one of the factors that affects him the most and with which he often has no more alternative, than to coexist with a bad design and of course with a bad construction. There are many stories that the maintainer would have to tell regarding this and therefore one of the requirements as effective and efficient maintainers, and anticipating some abnormality a posteriori, is to demand their participation in the design and construction of any system of physical assets that will plan to maintenance it later. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to define the acquisition stage like all the phases of the physical asset life cycle, before operating and maintaining, we are going to address maintenance management during the engineering, procure, construction, pre-commissioning, commissioning and start-up. This article is a chapter extracted from my book Reality Centered Maintenance.

Keywords: Maintenance management; asset management; commissioning; engineering; procurement; construction; asset life cycle

The following image seeks to show the battery limit that may exist between the Project Management and the General Management, which later, will be in charge of operations, maintenance, and other departments that interrelated with the production process of that future plant that would be being built.

It is shown that the conceptualization, basic and detailed engineering plus the procurement, construction and pre-commissioning processes are the responsibility of the Project Management. A special case is the Commissioning Management which during the acquisition process will depend on the Management of Project, but once the start-up process begins and the plant will be operated and maintained later, it would depend on the General Management.

We know that the commissioning of a plant is an activity after construction and prior to both start-up and operating & maintaining the plant. Now, who should be the Commissioning Manager? In my opinion, it should be the future Operations Manager or the future Maintenance Manager of that plant. I would lean towards the Maintenance Manager because most of the startup activities are inspections and equipment testing and these are related to future execution by maintenance personnel.

At this acquisition stage is where any deviation that could affect future operations and maintenance can be corrected in time. It is for this reason that maintenance management must start from the conceptualization of the asset and/or asset system. 

The Commissioning Management must cover activities both as responsible or only participation of: maintenance / operations manual; maintenance strategies; taxonomy; CMMS with maintenance plans and spare parts with maximum and minimum (2 years of operation and long delivery time, that is, Capital Spare); HAZOP; FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis); organization chart and infrastructure for execution, maintainability; reliability and availability; plans based on the RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance) methodology, and maintenance procedures, facilities, accessibility, infrastructure for dismantling, transport and repair, among others.

Additionally, it will be responsible for receiving the witness from the Project once the Mechanical Completion has been completed to proceed with the preparation and tests for the commissioning.

It is noted that the RCM methodology, mentioned above, even when it was developed in the aviation industry during the 1960's and 1970's, and documented in detail in 1978 by Ing. Howard Heap and Stanley Nowlan of United Airlines for the defense department from the USA, we in Venezuela began to implement it in the 90's with the support of the book Reliability Centered Maintenance by John Moubray. In my opinion, it is here when at the organizational level they made a mistake, by dismembering the maintenance organization from the responsibility of reliability, creating a new organization for reliability, ideally having strengthened the maintenance department with the attribute of reliability. The maintainer will work under this reliability criterion.

This situation, sometime later, was the cause that the reliability personnel entrenched themselves in office tasks and that the maintainer worked mainly in corrective and reactive execution, generating a distance between maintenance and reliability.

In summary, the Reliability Centered Maintenance methodology is a technique whose main purpose is to develop a maintenance plan in an industrial facility.

RCM covers, in a general way, how to define a priority level for critical equipment, preventing them from reaching the point of failure (preventive maintenance), and at the same time leaving those less critical for the application of corrective maintenance and Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA), which is considered a fundamental tool when developing the RCM methodology of identifying, evaluating and preventing possible failures.

It is no secret to anyone that little by little the development of maintenance plans through this methodology has tended to disappear since maintenance is more governed by inspection and predictive analysis under continuous monitoring. In other words, preventive execution would mainly depend on the technical recommendation (prescription) generated by the predictive analysis.

Continuing with the responsibilities of this Commissioning Manager, he should not work alone, and for that it is very important to have the future Head of Planning by his side. his right hand and brain of the Maintenance Organization. Both must be aligned and therefore be handling all the necessary information that they will later require during operation and maintenance.

In short, this Commissioning Management as the project progresses, gradually grows its organizational structure both in terms of personnel, infrastructure and responsibilities, until it becomes a Maintenance organization.

In accordance with the Standard EN16646 Maintenance in the Management of Physical Assets, much of the information that the future Maintenance Manager, Head of Planning and other professionals in the maintenance area must handle during this acquisition stage, and which will be used subsequently are the following:

1. The taxonomic structure of physical assets. This is very important information since this is required to be able to capture all the information related to these assets, in computerized systems that are related both to asset management (EAM: Enterprise Asset Management), and to maintenance management already mentioned above (CMMS: Computerized Maintenance Management System).

In short, a taxonomic structure of assets is the fundamental basis for executing maintenance planning in the operate and maintain phase, but it must be defined in the project stage. A fairly complete model of the taxonomic structure is shown in the following image.

And the image above shows an example, based on my experience in the Venezuelan oil and gas industry and structured in a simple way, focused on the fact that the installation is a Refinery, the Plant is the Steam Generation Plant with the System of Boilers, the Equipment Unit being Boiler 1, Sub Equipment Unit a Pump and the Parts in this case Bearings.

Once the operational context and the hierarchy of assets by levels of criticality have been established, they must be configured; for example, in the CMMS, for which the following aspects must be taken into account:

Verify the existing data in the CMMS through the recurrent study of the identified technical locations.

Configure the facilities, systems or subsystems consecutively depending on the operational context.

Ensure that the teams are associated to the levels of the technical locations, depending on the operational context.

Define the assets avoiding as much as possible the use of abbreviations, symbologies, acronyms, among others, and make an explicit description of them (technical locations, equipment, components and bills of materials) according to the number of pre-configured characters in the CMMS..

Configure the hierarchy of assets by criticality analysis.

Assign the taxonomic classification for technical locations.

Assign the taxonomic classification for teams.

Define the technical locations and equipment with the required data.

This hierarchy of physical assets facilitates the location of records and technical and financial data from higher to lower levels or vice versa. It also provides an adequate framework for the company to structure the data in a CMMS and facilitates the classification of its equipment.

The taxonomy for physical assets leads to a controlled administration of preventive, corrective, improvement or replacement actions during the life cycle, in addition, it generates early contributions for the management of maintenance, for the preparation of criticality analyzes and plans of maintenance.

Finally, the taxonomic structure provides information to make improvements in the formulation, approval, execution, administration, control and review of asset maintenance budgets, which must be considered to establish maintenance plans, according to the policy and strategy of maintenance.

2. The estimated cost of each intervention is used especially to make decisions between replace or repair, and determine the spare parts to purchase whose cost could also be used to estimate the expected maintenance costs.

3. The characteristics of the assets, including plans with which information will allow us to determine the different failure modes and their possible maintenance execution.

4. In addition, as maintainers, we will also need information related to functional analysis, operating conditions, expected modes of operation, as well as environmental conditions and the expected useful life of the assets, which represents an important piece of information to determine the maintenance plans.

5. Risk analysis and reliability characteristics and especially the availability of the asset system, are studies that serve as the basis for planning maintenance and taking safety levels into account.

In this way, maintenance with the products listed above during this acquisition stage, both as responsible and/or as a participant, their actions can be framed in the following activities:

-Develop Maintenance strategies based on the SBP (Strategic Business Plan) and SAMP (Strategic Asset Management Plan).

-Determine the availability of tools, administrative infrastructure and personnel.

-Establish the required levels of Reliability and Maintainability.

-Determine the infrastructure for the execution of maintenance.

-Establish restoration times and logistics times.

-Estimate maintenance costs.

-Establish strategies to predict and prevent failures, through the routing of predictive inspections and preventive maintenance plans.

-Determine the ability to detect breakdowns with early detection devices.

-Evaluate the existence of facilities to make adjustments and cleaning easily.

-To ensure easy accessibility to the components for maintenance.

-Make it simple to identify and locate the assets in the field.

-Have available the analysis of the optimal point of equilibrium between the price of a new asset and the cost of repair.

-Provide analysis of interchangeability of assets and components.

-Have strategies to achieve standardization to build and / or manufacture assets and / or spare parts.

-Evaluate modularity for quick component replacement.

-Seeking to achieve redundancy of assets.

-Determine the maximum time limits before and after repairing.

-Have the necessary information for the acquisition of any asset.

-Have methodologies to assess the risk of obsolescence.

-Elaborate maintenance tasks.

-Have information on the impact of asset solutions on the life cycle costs of the asset system.

In summary, the maintenance organization, through the participation and responsibility of the Commissioning Manager, would be able to establish what the presence of maintenance means from the project stage, guaranteeing the highest reliability of physical assets from their engineering, construction, installation and start up.

It is noteworthy that during the commissioning itself, future operators and maintainers of the plant must already be present. They are those who, in line with project personnel, will participate in the plant start-up stage as indicated verifying operational connections of start, stop, normal and emergency operation, verifying that they have the corresponding blockages, purges, vents and drains, among others.

In addition to the aforementioned, at this stage, together with the Commissioning Manager, the future Head of Planning will be working, among whose activities and responsibilities would have to be uploading information to the CMMS.

It is very important, first, the CMMS platform (Computerized Maintenance Management System) that is going to be used must be defined, being recommended that it be friendly, practical and simple, and that it be designed based on the true needs, in case it is new.

Among the responsibilities and participation of the future Head of Planning, is the creation of the taxonomic structures explained above, as well as defining the spare parts of 2 years of operation, which are those of normal consumption used during preventive / corrective maintenance and belong to the spending budget.

In the case of long delivery time spare parts (Capital Spare), they are used for major maintenance (Overhaul) and plant shutdowns, which are normally established to bring the asset back to its original operation and their high value are charged to the investment budget.

Another activity on the part of the future Head of Planning, supported by the manufacturers' recommendation, Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) and Risk Based Inspection (RBI) studies is to determine preventive maintenance plans and the routing of predictive inspection.

We must be clear that the spare parts are determined as a maximum and minimum that should be in stock in order to minimize delays in the execution of maintenance.

Once the CMMS is defined together with everything proposed, all the information is loaded into the CMMS, including the taxonomic structure, catalog the spare parts, maximum and minimum, maintenance plans with their respective man-hours, associated spare parts, equipment, among others.

With this information, the entire maintenance management process will be executed in the following phases of operating and maintaining, renovation and disincorporation, which will be handled in a large percentage by the maintenance brain group, which is maintenance planning.

It is very important to highlight that at this stage, both planning, procurement, and project personnel must do analysis in order to achieve standardization of spare parts, mainly in cases when the assets to be acquired will be installed in existing infrastructures or they will have an interrelation with them, thus avoiding a high diversity of spare parts in warehouses and minimizing high inventories.

The aforementioned, validates the importance that maintenance participation should have during this acquisition stage, being a great contribution that would be made in the future operations and maintenance of these assets, being able to detect any abnormality early.

In this regard, I would like to mention that between 2003-2004 I was in charge of the electricity commissioning of the expansion of the Puerto La Cruz Refinery (Valcor) in Venezuela, and together with 5 other electricians we began to get involved, almost completing the construction of this plant, however we were able to detect several abnormalities.

Among some of the abnormalities, it was that in order to disassemble an engine with its pump weighing approximately 2 tons, at least one crane of more than 160 tons was going to be required, which was not because of the weight but because of the reach of the crane, you can imagine the cost of renting a crane of this type just to dismantle that motor-pump assembly.

Therefore, before the delivery of the plant and in conjunction with the construction personnel, facilities were created so that this disassembly will be carried out with Crane Cranes of at least 5 tons.

But today we have computational platforms that, through augmented reality, from the engineering process you can virtually walk around the plant and simulate events, and that can determine abnormalities in time, such as this example mentioned.

I continue to highlight the importance of maintenance from the design and I bring as an anecdote the negative effects that an error could generate for the future operations and maintenance of these facilities.

In approximately 1995, acting as Maintenance Supervisor of Gas Compressor Turbines in San Tome, Venezuela, Project Management handed us a gas turbocharger plant at the Guico plant.

Six months after being operational and based on the 4000-hour maintenance plan, we executed this preventive maintenance and among several activities that were contemplated, was that of aligning the turbine gas producer with respect to the gearbox and the centrifugal compressors with respect to the gearbox, detecting that everything was within normal parameters.

A similar turbocharger is shown in the image below.

During those two days that maintenance lasted, it was the rainy season and once this turbocharger started, the vibration system suddenly stopped the equipment due to high vibration and this became repetitive in the following days.

We opted to check the alignment again, we moved the turbine, compressors, pipeline and the vibration was still continuing.

They were almost 3 continuous days without sleep looking for the solution to the problem, until we came to the conclusion that there was a bad design since it was detected that the electrical power (AC) groundings had connected it to the electronic system ground instrumentation and also the grounding of the vibration system (DC).

Since it had rained, the parasitic currents produced by lightning effects, among others, affected the vibration system giving false signals and therefore stopped the equipment. As a result of remedying this, which meant a great deal, in the end maintenance coexisted with the problem and every time it rained we opted to force the signals to avoid stoppages without justification.

In reality, there could be many reasons why a bad design and / or construction would be incurred, be it due to technical ignorance or rushing the delivery time of the work. But one of the ones that I highlight the most is to want to save a budget on the design and construction and that many times influences high maintenance costs since we have to choose to redesign to normalize those costs.

There will be some people who during the operation and maintenance phase, think that with a redesign they solve this design error, but other times it is necessary to live with this error. Implementing this new design would, for example, merit investing a lot of money or it means affecting the production due to having the plant stopped for a long time, among other scenarios.

In this sense, it is good to know that as maintenance is the last link in the chain, any deviation introduced by the maintainer would be palpable in affecting the productivity of the corporation, the consequence of which could simply be reflected in layoffs or replacement of personnel.

Meanwhile, in the case of any bad design, the maintainer would be correcting the problem and many times coexisting with this abnormality by means of palliative methodologies also called hot water cloths, and for this reason, I am convinced that the engineering staff will continue working on other projects.

Consistent with this, my phrase:

"For a Design Mistake, there will always be a Maintainer correcting it" (E.V.2020).