Normally CMMS can only give maintenance costs spent on each equipment and utility cost required for each equipment is not included because the utility cost are tracked separately on a lump sum basis eg electricity cost for motor, steam for turbines, gas for reformer & boilers. From lifecycle cost point of view, considering only maint costs give a one-sided view, which is not sufficient when taking into account equipment efficiency. Is there a way to track utlity cost spent on each equipment? TQ

Measuring the electricity on a plant is perfectly possible, your local power company does it all the time, but you have to ask yourself if it is a value added activity.
You can put meters on main branches, but every equipment? Once some bean counters (finance) started this discussion, my answer: yes lets do it, we put in a lot of meters, and also on all the building blocks, so we can trace these irresponsible slackers who leave the lights and computers on while they are on holiday. Maybe with the savings we could pay the extra manpower needed for checking the meters, comparing the bills and maintaining the equipment.
Also the most important thing : the manpower to feed the monsters (ERP, CMMS, excel graphs). we proposed to finance to include the meter taking in their end of the month inventory

End of discussion

Have you done a plant/equipment efficiency improvement program? If yes, how were the results? Any big savings? TQ

Josh, forgive if I am wrong, maybe I am just poking around in the wrong forum (SAP).

Our organisation has to so called maintenance centric model.
Operations and Maintenance are on the same level, reporting to a division manager (refinery).
Stores/procurement is another division (Finance)
The responsibilities over the CMMS are split between Maintenance and Procurement. Every employee who wants to aquire goods/services has to go through the CMMS (procurement) no shortcuts.

In your organisation, who is the owner of the "CMMS" is that accounting? In our organisation there are two distinct owners, Maintenance and Procurement.

Operations also records and submit their expenditures (stock inventory, water usage, oil consumption etc.) but these figures are not entered in the CMMS. Of course the payment transactions are done in the CMMS, just like chemicals etc, but the details of how much fuel is burned are found in the Refining Report (monthly) that also has the production figures.

Trying to compare, where given this set of actors, do you stand?

We operate like your environment. So how do you get savings on utility expenses? Looking at maint cost is only half of the story in our case. How do you integrate all those individual reports to have biz at d speed of lite? ERP or CMMS? TQ

Josh you didn't tell where in the organization you stand.
I am giving the (grunt) maintenance vision.
OK about utilities, a couple of years ago I started an initiative for monitoring steam traps with ultrasound. Today it is part of our preventive maintenance, Operations cary out the surveys at night, maintenance receives a list with defects. I guess you know the effect of leaking steam traps.
1)We did not employ more people,
2) we did not put maintenance people on shift to do the survey.
3) We also did not analyze how much chemicals, water and fuel we were saving.
4) We just spend $7000 on a ultraprobe with training
5) It was justified using information of the DOE (Department Of Energy) among others and plain horse maintenance and operation sense. I threw in some ROI, different scenarios, some fancy excel graphs etc. for the bean counters. Bottom line we wanted to solve all these "mysteries" haunting our steam distributing system, taking out hit and run practices or any witch doctor advise.

You save money one side (bean producers) and the bean counters (administrative organisations) will throw it out the window anyway.

What we gathered was knowledge, today the operators and the mechanics know more about the working and dangers of steam then 4 years ago. Also they know more about their steam tracing system. If we suspect a cold tracing line or trap, within 2 seconds we know the origin (steam manifold / valve number) and the destiny (condensate manifold / valve number) just typing in the product line number as found on the P&ID's. I made a custom based software to achieve this.

In the past when the relief valve in the deareator was popping up, there were a lot of absurd theories explaining this phenomenom, except that the cause was live steam in the condensate return lines, preventing other traps to discharge their condensate, flooding the tracing lines with condensate. The result: higher energy consumption on the pumps. We had times, especially in the rainy season at night, the shift electrician had to "sleep" in the motor control center because the crude feed charge pump could trip any moment.

How many money we saved? I don't know, neither care, all I know that isolating foulty branches is done quickly. In the past this could take weeks (people always telling that they could not find the place to isolate the leak). We manage about 500 steam traps this way.

If I had to quantify in money what we achieved, documenting the traps, field checks and rechecks of lines, traps etc, and the time documenting, if I had to give an hour tarif for setting up the database, developping the software etc. and putting all this in the justification, I would still busy buying the ultraprobe

I just made it and when ready, I asked for the hardware, and committed myself and my crew to implement.

Ok Mate thanks for sharing your experience. Yes we also have steam traps for which your comment is applicable. TQ

[QUOTE]Originally posted by svanels:
In your organisation, who is the owner of the "CMMS" is that accounting?
[QUOTE]

In my organization the IS/IT Manager runs monthly meetings with what we call Business Process Owners (BPOs). Who are they? Mostly Managers of every function of the corporation who "owns" a module or a subset of transactions in our SAP R/3 system. Maintenance, Finance, Procurement, Operations, Human Resources, etc. There are only small groups of our organization which do not have a BPO. Those are the groups that only use the system for requesting a repair (the PM Module is owned by Maintenance Engineering) or to request a good/service through purchase requisitions (which is owned by Procurement).

BPOs negociate with the IS Manager configuration changes, improvements, and the wish lists not met during implementation project.

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