Up Time Magazine- April/May 2008 - (Page 22) information technology upload Reliability and CMMS Implementation A Tale of Ups and Downs at (formerly) Lone Star Steel by Allen Strickland C reating a structured reliability engineering department in a facility that has never had one is challenging enough. If you simultaneously implement a new computerized maintenance management software (CMMS) program, the hurdles get higher. The key to success is to have the right management support, good communication and a clear vision of what the future should be. This article will discuss some of the triumphs and pitfalls that we have encountered on our unending journey through a complex culture change. crane crew whose only job was to perform regular inspections and repairs to the cranes plant-wide. We normally took three to seven day annual outages on each department to do major repairs and modifications as well as to install and commission capital projects. But the percentage of our time and resources that went to PM and PdM tasks, as opposed to recovering from failures, was small. Prior to the implementation of the CMMS and Reliability Engineering group, the structure at Lone Star Steel consisted of seven operating departments, with each having a fairly stand-alone maintenance organization. These stand-alone organizations typically consisted of a maintenance superintendent who had one or more mechanical and electrical foremen reporting to him. The day-to-day activities of the bargaining unit work force were then directed by the foremen. Additionally, there were centralized machine shops, welding shops, carpenter shops, electric shops, instrument shops, millwright shops and fleet maintenance shops that provided service to the entire plant. The entire plant maintenance organization fell under one manager. The organization chart of this group resembled the diagram shown in Figure 1. (Note that only three operating areas are shown instead of seven for clarity.) Over the years, a couple of the departments’ maintenance groups dabbled in the use of CMMS, but most did not use it. Since usage of a CMMS system was not a structured methodology, the data that was captured, while useful, was not comprehensive. Therefore, the data did not tell the whole story of what was being done to the equipment. In July of 2005, the first ever plant-wide CMMS at Lone Star Steel was launched and the software chosen was TabWare®. An outside consulting group was brought in to assist in training to facilitate the implementation of TabWare®. The actual implementation strategy was planned as follows. First, the equipment lists and hierarchies were established in TabWare® for each department. This consisted of entering equipment data and descriptions, assigning each piece a unique equipment number and coding the equipment to the correct departmental cost center. Then, the correct parent/child relationships were established in the hierarchy between all associated pieces of equipment. Next, we gathered all of the existing PM documents in the departapril/may 2008 First, a little history about Lone Star Steel. We are a 54 year old steel mill located in the piney woods of Northeast Texas. We are about 120 miles east of Dallas. The original facility was started by the United States government during World War II in an effort to geographically diversify the nation’s steel making and coking coal usage from the northeastern United States. The original facility consisted of an ore mining operation, a blast furnace and a cast iron pipe facility. With the end of World War II, the facility became a private enterprise. The early 1950’s saw the addition of a 4HI Steckel rolling mill for rolling slabs into coils and the installation of two ERW pipe mills. Over the following decades, two electric arc furnaces were added along with heat treating, pipe finishing and specialty tubing facilities. Lone Star Steel was the first domestic tube and pipe producer to receive ISO 9001 certification. Even today, much of the major original equipment is still in use after 50 plus years of service. Spare parts sometimes have to be machined, as in many cases, the original equipment manufacturers have gone out of business years ago. From a maintenance perspective, Lone Star Steel has historically been in a reactive maintenance mode. Over the years, we became expert “fire fighters”, possessing the ability to fix almost anything in rapid fashion in order to restore production. This ability to respond to emergency situations began to earn praise and recognition. All the while we should have been focusing on eliminating the occurrence of the emergencies. But firefighting became our culture. It is what we knew how to do and do well. To do anything else would require a major culture change within the whole organization. And the more time we spent fighting fires, the less time we had to try to migrate towards increasing our preventive work. But the reality was that without this needed culture change, we would be doomed to ever decreasing production as the lack of preventive (PM) and predictive (PdM) maintenance continued to take larger and larger tolls on our equipment. Now, I don’t mean to imply that we were void of preventive or predictive maintenance. We had a fairly good lubrication program in place, and we worked hard at keeping equipment adjusted, tightened and cleaned. We were good at checking for wear on mechanical and electrical components during weekly downturns, if time permitted. We had a 22
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.