Up Time Magazine- April/May 2008 - (Page 11) shortage. BELCO also maintains an interesting mix of legacy and state of the art generation equipment, and shop floor staff must be capable of maintaining both. Finally, we must not forget the looming external pressures on the company – from businesses, the government, the community and the shareholders – to “do more with less” in order to deliver increased value to them. These factors and more are the backdrop to our quest for improvement. A decision was made to explore RCM as a means to address, or at least partially offset, some of these issues. ing at a conference filled with RCM gurus and stating categorically that virtually the same results could be achieved by skipping – under the right terms of course - what some term as essential steps in traditional RCM. Despite the controversial approach, we adopted this variation because it suited where we were as an organization. It promised results 6 times faster than a Classical approach. It promised we could take our key staff – already in short supply – off the floor for only a week at a time and make good progress. It promised that the results would be comparable to the Classical approach. Factors in our organization that supported this approach included a solid track record of planning and scheduling. We had well developed PMs with years of planning and operation experience represented in them, and they were computerized. We had a solid record of our forced outage history with basic causes logged. We had a comprehensive set of documentation for our equipment. We maintain close relations with the original equipment manufacturers and other operators of like equipment. We have an in-house pool of bona fide experts: fitters, planners, engineers, operators, predictive maintenance technicians all with hands on experience for substantial amounts of time. These were the factors that supported the implementation of a PMO-style RCM program. Interestingly enough, it was just after we decided to use a PMO process that I got feedback from another similar firm who had employed RCM2. This island utility had: 1. Hired consultants to train their staff 2. Took 20% of their workforce off the shopfloor fulltime 3. Had them perform analysis for 18 months And, in the end, they never implemented RCM. Here is the response I got when I asked what problems they ran into: 1. Staff who were off the floor had grief about not being involved in overhaul work (overtime?). 2. Staff who were not involved ‘lost contact’ and did not support the program. 3. The Maintenance Manager was 4 years from retirement and did not care for the program. 4. They calculated they would need more staff for the transition period. 5. There was a perception (not proven) that inventory levels would increase You can imagine the frustration of key staff that spent a year and a half of their working lives trying to better a maintenance program only to see it abandoned. There were some benefits to the analysis such as a realization of the need to do more predictive technology work, but the bulk of the promise of RCM was never realized. Ironically, some folks at the firm are still convinced that RCM is a good thing. This was quite the wake-up call to us at the outset of our RCM Journey into Uncharted Waters. But we had chosen an approach that seemed sound and we knew could be sustained if we have management’s support to provide dedicated access to our top staff for short periods of time. If management agreed to these terms, inclusive of a dedicated leader to drive the initiative, our decision would be finalized. Decision Time In the first instance, the team assigned to investigate RCM started their education by attending a conference dedicated to this maintenance approach. It was there that we were able to network with practitioners and vendors and get a sense for the approaches being used, as well as the benefits and limitations of these approaches. It is important to separate the sales pitch from the reality, and talking with other users is a good way to do that. While there, we learned there are many variations on RCM, and we had to find the one that best suited us. One key question that was always kept in mind was: Will this philosophy work for our plant? Vendors quite proudly spoke of the numerous industries in which they found success: pharmaceuticals, nuclear, hydro, pig farms everything, it seemed, except a large diesel plant. Initially, the best data we could find that was remotely comparable was work done on small (truck sized) diesel engines for mining equipment. We keyed in on a few service providers and explored them further upon our return to Bermuda. It was important to find an approach that would work for our organization, both its business and its people. We could not afford to judge a program in a vacuum, but had to take into account how the rollout would proceed and internal factors that would either support or limit its success. We chose a service provider that has a program that played to our strengths, and just happened to offer a substantial reduction over traditional RCM approaches in manpower requirements and time to results. While it is not central to this discussion, it was interesting to note the service provider committed what must be the equivalent of heresy by presentwww.uptimemagazine.com Selling the Program Everyone has their needs and wants at work. We wanted to do this, so our next task was to convince our Executive and Management that RCM was a productive use of already scarce resources. We arranged a series of presentations in which we discussed our research, projection of the benefits, and conclusions. Admittedly, some of the numbers were mere copies of the typical results our vendor had achieved with other industries using the process. There was no way we could substantiate the numbers without any experience to draw on. However, based on the compelling results seen elsewhere, and a lot of passion, we were able to convince our executive that the numbers we were projecting were achievable, if they were willing to commit the resources. Right off the bat we projected: 1. A 20% increase in productivity 2. Cut downtime in half 3. Measurable results in 18 months To be sure, if we achieved even half of this, our leaders would be very impressed. These are unheard of numbers in our industry. Our next task was to convince the key set of staff for the project, namely our shop floor staff, that this was something of benefit to them. In real terms, whenever folks mention a 20% increase in productivity, there is more than a hint of less overtime for the blue collar worker. This is a fringe benefit of RCM in most cases, and with us the real prize was in 11 http://www.uptimemagazine.com
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