Reliabilityweb.com Reader Feedback from John Harris:

A large part of Reliabilityweb.com material addresses what to do for the assets on a site, how to squeeze performance from a CMMS or some slightly higher tech approach to motor monitoring. How much discussion do you lead that deals with the integrity of the asset register in the first instance?

I ask because I have seen very significant investment in the implementation of a CMMS, or perhaps an RCM-style process to build a maintenance plan, only to see 80% of the budget funds disappear into the process of auditing the site’s asset registers to achieve uniformity among them and an accurate asset base in the CMMS.

What thoughts or comments do you or your readers have about this topic?

John Harris

At our facilities we distinguish fixed assets and assets, both are registered in the CMMS.
The assets are production installations/equipment, buildings that need maintenance and are handled by the maintenance organization

Fixed assets are capital goods above certain value and are part of the companies inventory. They do not have a specific production function, example: furniture. These fixed assets are handled by the Finance Administration, although registering is through the keepers of the CMMS (maintenance)

Asset register in SAP Plant Maintenance module is included in Technical Objects as Functional Location and Equipment nos. It should be comprehensive ie to include all main equipment in the plant or facility including their piping loops (preferably as per RBI) and also instrument loops. This is a mandatory exercise if the aim is to collect a complete/total maintenance history for all assets over their life cycle for subsequent meaningful analyses for performance measurement in SAP PMIS or SAP BW recently. The whole data can be mass-uploaded into SAP to save time and susequent chnages can be done manually.

Inside each equipment master data, as a minimum, the fields for equipment class and type, criticality (ABC indicator), catalog profile, manufacturer, work centre and cost centre should be filled up. A lot of upfront engineering works is needed to come up with these databases (not sure whether available from SAP AG).

After the above, BOM should be made for equipment at least for criticality 1 first for to speed up materials planning in work orders later. For simple/small equipment like pumps & motors, single level BOMs should be sufficient but multi-level/assembly BOMs should be used for large/complex eqpt like compressor & turbines.

Then comes maint plans & tasklists at least for eqpt with criticality 1 first which are used to generate planned maintenance work orders like preventive & predictive maintenance and also for planned overhauls during turnaorund/ shutdown. Again a lot of engineering works is needed to come out with the task lists and maint plans which can be started using OEM manuals and then improve using eqpt failure history. Once RCM, RBI and IPF exercises are completed, the initial tasklists and maint plans can be replaced using the action plans from these exercises.

In addition, individual equipment should be linked using say functional location structure in a manner to represent the plant/facility hierarchy ie from company level to several plants to various process units to hundred superfunctional locations to thousand functional locations to equipment to assembly BOM to materials.

Finally it's necessary to use correct notification and order types with the right job priority during the maintenance processing for proper data collection such as BM for breakdown, CM for corretive maintenance, PM for preventive maint, PC for plant changes, IN for inspection, NC for non-core acitities & HI for historical works. The users should be competent in basic maint terminology.

I hope the comments can help. TQ