Maintenance Technology May 2015 - (Page 10)

UPTIME STOs The Pit-Crew Way Bob Williamson Contributing Editor M ethods from motorsports racing and pit crews can provide invaluable insights for plant shutdown, turnaround and outage (STO) maintenance. At the track, people, machines, plans, schedules, parts, supplies and more must come together in short periods of time to successfully accomplish specific maintenance and repair tasks during pit stops. While a race team's pit crew is considerably smaller than the STO teams in today's plants, many of the same principles and methods apply. Following is an example from when I was asked to observe, from a pit-crew perspective, a 24-hour STO in a paper mill and offer suggestions for improvements. Ready ... I arrived at the mill two days before the shutdown to review the plan and schedule, and inspect the targeted equipment and facilities. The overall STO planning team, which included team leaders from many different sub-teams (each with specific work packages to accomplish), had been working off and access to special equipment were worked out in the planning sessions. Set ... Armed with the final STO plan and schedule, the work package planners had been issuing work orders, ordering parts, materials and supplies, and lining up contractors. A marshalling area had been set up for support equipment. Materials and parts were assembled into "kits" along with the associated work orders and necessary documentation. Work packages, plans and schedules were distributed to various project teams for their preparation. Meanwhile, work-package team leaders focused on their respective parts of the overall STO schedule, communicated to their team members, and made sure their parts, supplies and special tools were staged and ready. Pit stops, for the most part, are planned maintenance downtime. Any work that can be done in the pit stall has been planned. and on for six weeks on a master plan for the STO event. During the process, some of the planning sessions proceeded with substitute team representatives or absences. Nevertheless, any known gaps were ultimately resolved in the final planning session. The teams' plans and schedules all rolled into the master STO plan and schedule that was posted on the walls of the "war room." All issues associated with cross-team sequencing, overlapping activities 10 | MAINTENANCE TECHNOLOGY Go ... On the appointed day, the mill's shutdown began at 6 a.m. Nearly 200 people grouped in smaller task teams descended on the plant. Things appeared to go smoothly. Leaders gathered their team members in front of their posted plans and schedules. Work packages were assigned as planned. Last-minute questions were clarified. Problems surfaced about two hours into the shutdown. The operations team had turned the power off and locked out a machine despite the fact that a maintenance team needed the machine powered up to move a major component into position. A heated debate ensued. Two teams' work came to a halt. Schedules were consulted, and the overall STO project leader was invited to referee the dispute: Work was interrupted for one team while the other team performed its powered-up tasks. The project schedule that the operations team had developed for itself conflicted with the maintenance schedule. It was subsequently discovered that the project leader from the operations team had not attended most of the STO planning sessions. "After all," he explained, "it was a 'maintenance' event. We thought we could accomplish some of our own tasks during the shutdown." The operations team MAY 2015

Maintenance Technology May 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Maintenance Technology May 2015