I just got this email from a friend who said

quote:

Most people are amazed at the amount of Preventive and Predictive maintenance operators do in most of our client organizations.
The operators are doing the following % of Preventive and Predictive maintenance by manhours in the following industry types:

Process plants - 75%
Mobile mining equipment 50%
Manufacturing 60%

I am one of those people who are amazed!

What is the percentage at your plant?

Terry O

Your 'friend' wouldn't by any chance be in the business of selling equipment or services that promote the use of operators to carry out Preventive and Predictive maintainance?

Terrence, Buzz,

At the risk of stating the obvious, all work done by maintainers is NOT maintenance work, similarly, all work done by operators is not operational work.

Cleaning, lubrication, adjustment, alignment, testing of protective devices, stroking of valves, starting of standby equipment, renewal of catalyst beds etc. are all maintenance activities. many of them may not have a work order, and may just be listed in the operator's job description. In a facility with many sophisticated, costly and complex equipment, testing of protective devices alone may form 20-30% of the total maintenance workload, most or all of it done by operators.

Terry, while I find the quoted figures high, it may be that they actually account for all the maintenance activities correctly. Perhaps your friend can give you a breakdown of the figures he gave you.

Taking out:
* our Packaging Area which have operator-mechanics assigned who perform the line setups, change overs and the mechanical PM and corrective orders,
* maintenance tasks that has a daily frequency (not entered at the CMMS, but added to the operator setup routine),
* equipment cleaning

Our operators does not perform maintenance. Besides, not all operators are good enough to be trusted maintenance tasks. For example, I'm a car driver (operator) but no auto mechanic, besides adding fluids and cleaning my car maintenance is trusted (and paid) to the mechanic.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Eugene,

Hm... maybe these clients do not have a formal maintence department.
There are lot of industries when the operator is "mainly" operator and is welder when needed.

There are still to many "industries" not doing maintenance because maintenance in their perception is seen as not a value added activity.

Does anyone have any recent information regarding annual overtime usage as a percentage of total maintenance time by Building Engineers in a 24x7 Critical Facility?

WT

Other thing, how many of you receive maintenance requests where the operator reports: "the equipment does not turns on"; ending with a maintenance order where the mechanic reports something like this after his troubleshooting: "equipment fine, the operator did not follow the correct operational procedure".

The figures appear to be on the high side but I wonder whether it can be achievable even if all first line maintenance works are carried out by operators upon agreement with operations dept such as in TPM environment or Eqpt basic care program.

Some strong operations dept even take charge of measurement of condition monitoring parameters after training with maintenance doing difficult analysis & diagnostics. These exclude chemical & catalyst change outs which are traditionally done by operations.

With the above scenario, maintenance is left to heavy maintenance works such as major repairs, overhauls, shutdown works etc. To have this scenario, it has to be consciously set up from day one of the plant because changing the culture can be full of hurdles. However, having said that, as plants go for high automation, will the figures remain?

quote:

Originally posted by WT:
Does anyone have any recent information regarding annual overtime usage as a percentage of total maintenance time by Building Engineers in a 24x7 Critical Facility?

WT

Your question should be entered as a independent topic/post. Click on the "New" button with a yellow folder to start one.

I don't know about the percentages however, operators should be your first line of maintenance. They are with the machinery more than anyone else and should know it well, especially if they take ownership of the equipment.

Why not have them do it as long as it doesn't take specialized training or tools.

They can clean, lubricate and inspect. The last two tasks are or should be PM tasks. This can easily be written into the operations checklist.

Clean to inspect.
Inspect to detect.
Detect to correct.

Hello to all,

Regarding the operator's maintenance tasks figures reported previously I do not know but many companies are already using TPM and as you know the "Autonomous Maintenance Pillar" requires that simple tasks which do not require big technical knowledge have to be accomplished by operators.
So i don´t find odd that operators play a considerable role in PM activities.

As referred before they are the ones who spend more time by the equipments and then who knows if they aren’t more sensible to certain situations?
Should they be the first line of defence to prevent failure?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: egsilva,

Great news - the person who sent me those figures is on a plane from Australia to RCM-2006 in Vegas so cannot answer with more details immediately but has promised to do so once on the ground and without jet lag.

Stay tuned.

Re: Eugene's post to WT - agreed - That is a new discussion and would be welcomed - so please post it as new if you still have interest.

Terry O

quote:

simple tasks which do not require big technical knowledge have to be accomplished by operators

I have been on both sides of the fence, and it looks like that in "some" industries the "smart guys are put into operations" and when it comes to "maintenance" they are staffed with the leftovers. The rationale behind this is that "Operation generates the money" so we need there the "Einsteins"
Proof: Go to any University and ask the future mechanical, electrical engineer if he/she want to go into maintenance. The maintenance professional is associated with broken things.

Coming back to the point, will the "working elite" accept doing jobs that is for cleaners, lubricators and fire fighters?

Back here the trade high schools get full with the bullies, the not yet drop outs, and the no-good with books in the hope they manage to learn a mechanical, plumbing, or electrical trade since they can not handle the mathematics or science to opt for the engineering (or even business administration) university.

Plumbing, carpentry, electricity is mathematics and science.
Reading a dial indicator when aligning a pump, is not for someone who has trouble reading the numbers on a ruler .
Sadly enough white collar workers jobs are seen as the only way to succeed in live.

quote:

Originally posted by Terrence O'Hanlon:
Great news - the person who sent me those figures is on a plane from Australia to RCM-2006 in Vegas so cannot answer with more details immediately but has promised to do so once on the ground and without jet lag.

Stay tuned.

Did you received feedback from your source on the high figures?

Hi Folks,
I used to post in the old forum on ReliabilityWeb and dropped off when it changed to this version. Now that I have worked out how to do things, I will take more interest.
To introduce myself, I was the person that informed Terry O of the numbers regarding operator manhours in maintenance.
To answer Buzz.... I live on the "dark side". I am a maintenance consultant but I have no interest in selling things that promote operator maintenance. I think Buzz was making a joke and I can see the humour in his post, but thought I would clarify this anyway.
In order to explain where my numbers come from, is should say that we specialise in PM Optimisation which is an alternative to RCM. PMO starts with the existing maintenance program and uses RCM logic to review and rationalise existing PM... But our program (PMO2000) more importantly adds to the existing program tasks that should be done that are not. The maintenance program produced by PMO2000 is the same as you would get from classical RCM.
Our company and associates have performed thousands of these analyses and the numbers I posted come from these reviews. If anyone is interested in the source material in table form, then I have provided this via a power point presentation attached. In short though, if you document all the tasks operators do each shift that are maintenance inspections or fixed time cleaning etc as Vee pointed out, and then you allocate time to these, you will find the number is significant. 15 minutes each shift adds up to 45 mins per day. On the mining mobile equipment the operators did a 15 min pm every shift and then a clean and inspect every week. This added up to 294 manhours pa and when you add up the mechanic/elec/lubrication, the number came to 254. This is verifiable information folks. If anyone would like more information, please contact me via direct email or on this forum. I would be more than happy to assist.... Just as a last comment. I see maintenance as a process not a department. The process of maintenance starts and finishes with operatons. Operations involvment in the process of maintenance is necessary for succes.
For those of you who have read this email, let me shout you a beer. Hopefully you will have a Fosters in your esky.
Regards
Steve

OpsHours.PPT (94 Kb, 58 downloads) Tables of operator PM vs other trades

Having operators do cleaning, lubrication, and other time-based maintenance duties (the rationale behind TPM) is great as long as data from those tasks can be recorded in the CMMS system. If not (as in our case here), they become a nightmare for the Mantenance Department when trying to report KPIs to top management to measure its performance (and its right to exist).

Juan... I think differntly to you on this one. PM tasks that operators do weekly and daily need to be recorded on a log (book or sheet) that shows that the tasks have been done. Putting this information into a CMMS at the frequency the tasks are done is not good value for money in my opinion. The practicality of entering operator PM into the CMMS is poor so in my opinion, trying to make this happen will result in an out-of-control situation. You may as well face reality from the start.... You may have gathered I am not a purist when it comes to maintenance

I guess your figures are high because not all maintenance works such as major repairs, overhauls, shutdown works, major replacements etc are considered. Do your figures include inhouse manhours and external contractors manhours which are normally used for outsourced works?

Secondly, maybe your figures are more realistic in the mining & manufacturing scenarios because in these industries, the drivers are the operators cum first line maintainers and heavy repair works are done by central workshop.

In our local logging industry, the lorry drivers who can take care of their lorries will get higher pays due to savings from less breakdowns & spare parts and new recruits will follow experienced drivers for apprenticeships.

For your process plant scenario, is it a continuous or batch process? What is the level of automation employed?

In all the scenario, what is the organization set up? Do they have two separate operations and maintenance departments or maintenance is a subset of operations with a centralised workshop?