Sustainable Maintenance

Faster than ever changing environment

All industries are changing, mining is no exception. Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Condition Base Monitoring (CBM), 3D Printing, Digital Twins, Augmented Reality, and Industry 4.0 are no longer utopic ideas for a distant future, they are already installed in several companies bringing very interesting results. With them, things we used to do also need to be reevaluated. There are new challenges (budget crunches and more sustainable approaches, for example) and also new opportunities at hand. Maintenance teams cannot keep doing just the same old things. Maintenance leadership must be able to create an environment of continuous improvement and change, without compromising fundamental tasks and good practices.

To remain relevant and competitive, every business needs to reinvent itself from time to time. Change is necessary. However, change is also difficult and challenging. People tend to resist new things (finding all sorts of justifications) and, for whatever reason, this is even more accentuated in Maintenance areas.

So, why do we need to keep changing? What do we want to achieve with Maintenance anyway? We believe the maintenance purpose should be to ensure all critical equipment are running properly at the lowest sustainable cost possible. The maintenance culture must be aligned with this motto. Process and behaviors should be oriented to ensure equipment are running to their optimum capacity/performance and to avoid breakdowns and unplanned downtime on any critical machine. Whatever we use today, the most advanced technologies, the current best equipment will all become outdated and obsolete. So, in the same way, we need to maintain our assets, we need to maintain our people, processes, management tools, and culture to take advantage when new opportunities to improve arise.

New technologies, used properly, can help us to achieve better efficiency out of equipment and maintenance but, without a proper culture and environment of change, and without adequate management tools and controls, they may fail. It is not unusual to find very good ideas and initiatives wasted by poor implementations.

Are we acknowledging and rewarding the right behaviors in Maintenance?

Before discussing more complicated topics, let’s start with something simple: What is the culture we are fostering? Are we encouraging the right behaviors?

Let’s do a quick check. In the past month, who did you praise most? the people that fire fought a breakdown or the people who avoided breakdowns from happening?

How many times did you compliment a maintenance guy for fixing a breakdown? How many times did you compliment somebody for keeping a machine fully operational, with no breakdowns?

It doesn’t matter much what we write in procedures and routines, or the controls we put in place. People need a positive feedback for a good work. If we do not reinforce and recognize the right behaviors, people will just stop doing it.

Likewise, how many times have our maintenance guys taught operators how to use machines properly to use them efficiently and avoid breakdowns? If operators do not damage machines, maintenance doesn’t need to fix them. It’s one of the easiest low-hanging fruits. Take a few minutes to show, perhaps hours to fix a problem.

The more we (maintenance) interact with operators, by helping them to operate machines better, the more response on early issues we get (different noises, strange vibrations, high temperature, small leakages, pressure drops, etc). Are we also reinforcing this kind of behavior?

What got us here, may not get us there

We cannot capture the full benefit of new technologies if we are still in firefighting mode on the shop floor. Our first target should be minimizing unplanned downtime and after that reducing the planned downtime (yes, normally we can also do much better at it). Improving unplanned downtime has nothing to do with fixing things faster. Let’s be clear, there’s no sense in getting better at something that should not be done at all. We should avoid breakdowns, especially on critical equipment. But don’t stop there, small stoppages and performance losses also tend to account for significantly improving opportunities.

Next, we need to go after the planned downtime. Time-based preventive routines are actually not much better than running to failure in terms of costs. Several studies produced similar results; 80 - 88% of the spare parts normally replaced in such routines did not show signs of tear and wear that justified the replacement. It means money is thrown away. To make it worse, in most cases, PMs don’t avoid breakdowns either. So, we spend money to replace parts that were not yet bad, to try to avoid problems that will keep happening because we not acting in the right places… It gets even worse, some people instead of reviewing the PM process itself opt for reducing the time between preventives, adding even more costs to the business. Don’t forget cleaning and lubrication, if not done properly may lead to equipment issues and breakdowns.

Some studies claim every dollar invested in good proactive maintenance saves ten times that in reactive maintenance, the cost of avoiding downtimes on bottleneck equipment is even higher (some claim over 100 times).

For critical equipment, we need something better: We need high efficiency. If we list all the things we need to do to achieve a high-efficiency level, we can see the need to install some process to be able to create the base for another more advanced or sophisticated process.

There’s a kind of optimal order for doing things in maintenance. If we put all in order, we will get something that resembles a pyramid.

The behavior improvement is part of what we call “proactive” level, but this is the third level. The first level, “fundamentals”, most of the time, unfortunately, leaves us in a firefighting mode. However, we need to build those fundamentals; we just can’t stop there. The following level is “planned maintenance”. Things start to get better at the “proactive” level where we should be doing continuous improvement, root cause analysis (RCA), fault elimination, reliability studies, and so on. But guess what, we can still do better. I will get back to this later.

We, as leaders, need to push implementations and take people by their hands until they reach a point where they can make improvements by themselves. Firefighting and time-based preventive routines are way below what we can achieve in maintenance. Current budgets and quality requirements require us to do much better. And better, in this case, is possible.

Nowadays having good technicians is just a small part of what we need. We need to create teams with both diversity (covering all the maintenance needs in terms of skills and knowledge) and participation to achieve a collective intelligence that will be bigger than the sum of the parts. The behavior of the leaders is instrumental in fostering this kind of team. Capable teams will take ownership of the right tools and processes to improve and sustain high-level results. Supervisors, using the right tools, can efficiently control the process, early identifying deviations and acting on it.

New technologies, used properly, can open new options. Artificial Intelligence, for example, is very promising. Like other processes, we need good and reliable data to apply Machine Learning. Data can come from sensors (on-line monitoring/CBM). The usage of AI and neural networks can help us to predict failures and improve maintenance which would be very hard to do with just standard sensors (especially when the failure is a result of a combination of factors). Augmented Reality is another example, we can improve the efficiency of preventive maintenance routines (leading to fewer errors which impact both quality and availability). Using those new technologies, we can free time from technicians to do more added value activities and, of course, minimize costs.

As Einstein said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So, it’s time to review old concepts and aim for high efficiency in maintenance.

How to convince the team that they need to think and work differently?

As we said before, it is common to have resistance to change, especially in the maintenance area.

Human beings are, in general, afraid of change. People need to learn new things (sometimes from scratch), demanding time and effort, placing them outside their comfort zone. They need to understand, from the very beginning, how new processes, technologies, or management tools will help them to work better. At the end of the day, it is all about being more efficient in the things we do. Not changing will make them, in time, obsolete. And it is not just the maintenance professionals that need to adapt, the leadership team need to embrace and foster new opportunities, supporting the changing process (as there will be a learning curve and possibly some setbacks along the way). It is not uncommon that they feel threatened by new things, as they will need to learn a bit about themselves, but as an executive, they cannot lose the sight of what can be achieved in terms of efficiency and/or cost reduction.

It doesn’t matter our current state, we can be using the top technologies and state-of-the-art equipment or very old and outdated machines. Sooner or later even newer technologies, materials or production methods will become available leaving our practices and equipment obsolete. We need to have in place a continuous improvement mentality, so implementing new changes will be part of the routine and we will keep up with whatever happens. Continuous Improvement is an enabler of change, but it needs to be done by the entire team (not a person or group). Every technician on the shop floor must do root cause analysis (with support if needed) and think about how to prevent recurring failures, how to work more efficiently, how to improve machines to avoid risks.

The new processes and technologies must help people to work better. We want the teams to work smarter, not harder. Here again, new technologies can help a lot in doing the repetitive work better than a human could, freeing time for creativity, innovation, and other more added value activities (RCAs, FMEAs, reliability studies, and so on).

New processes and technologies should be implemented in such a way that people understand the value-added of the new things and they cannot see themselves working again in old ways, otherwise, there will be a risk of falling back to the previous stage (if it's comfortable to fall back, people will do it).

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What is our goal anyway?

As I said in the beginning, the maintenance purpose should be to ensure all critical equipment are running properly at the lowest sustainable cost possible. It means we not just know, but we have internal alignment about the most critical equipment. We need the best process and techniques in place, not to fix or firefight, but to make sure equipment are running properly at high efficiency: no breakdowns, no unplanned downtime. As a consequence, we can achieve an optimal operational and maintenance cost.

The optimal cost will be a combination of factors: spare parts costs, maintenance team time, operational costs, energy costs, and most importantly the production losses due to downtime (especially if in a production bottleneck or critical equipment). In other words, the relevant cost is the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Spare parts are an important costs, but often not taken in the right account. It is not just having spare parts in the stock, which of course needs to happen with the right balance among availability, inventory costs, and risks, but it goes beyond that. If a spare part does not last as long as we need, another alternative is required. Today there are plenty of possibilities using new production methods and materials. But we need to look at alternatives focusing on the TCO. Good spare parts, with the right design and materials that last longer (and so minimize replacement and all its related costs), will help to achieve the optimal cost.

Maintaining faster and more efficiently is also relevant, but how many equipments are actually designed for maintenance? Just a very few. This remains a significant improvement opportunity.

Keeping the correct maintenance practices, focusing on TCO will reduce costs over time. It doesn’t work the other way around. We cannot cut the maintenance budget and expect better results. But we can install the best processes, and techniques, the adequate MOS tools, and ensure discipline and safety. This combination will naturally lead to better results and lower costs, but it takes a bit of time and consistency.

Where should we start?

As we roll out new initiatives and implement new technologies, we need to keep doing some fundamental things. Things will not work at an optimal level when those fundamentals are not properly in place. Something similar to Maslow’s pyramid of needs: We cannot live in the higher levels if the lower levels are not being fulfilled. By making an analogy and transporting the psychology concepts to maintenance, we would have something like the picture below.

We need to have the fundamentals (safety, work orders, daily plans, 5S/housekeeping, etc) to start doing planned maintenance. Once there, we can focus on criticality, digitalization, workload, and required skills and move to a proactive level and so on until we reach a high-efficiency level. So, we need to start at the base of the pyramid: fundamentals.

Maintenance results will improve each level we climb until we reach the high-efficiency level (high reliability and lowest sustainable cost).

The maintenance pyramid

Adding more details, the picture would look like this one:

We all want to be at the top, on the high-efficiency level, but we need to master the other levels first. We cannot stop doing the lower levels to aim higher. If something goes wrong on the lower level, things go south fast like Maslow states.

In our point of view, maintenance should start in the early stages of a new project, so we can optimize a project looking through the maintenance point of view (Industry 4.0, machines designed for maintenance, asset efficiency, maximize synergies, parts standardizations, right materials, proper design, machine loads, easy access, poka-yokes, energy efficiency and so on). But we also need to ensure safety, an efficient work order system, a daily schedule, a monthly plan, on-the-job training, etc. We cannot focus on optimizations when equipment is constantly breaking.

There’s no magic here. The lowest sustainable cost will be the total cost of keeping the discipline of carrying out the right routines to maintain the machines running properly.

Do we need to install all those processes and controls? It depends on the results you want to achieve from the Maintenance area.

Keeping the discipline costs money. There’s a limit some parts can run. Not keeping the discipline costs even more, it falls back to the reactive mode (correctives), accelerates equipment deterioration, and brings higher costs for either overhauls or asset replacements. So, the choice is yours. Choose wisely.

Eduardo Schumann