Consultant’s Comment: The problem with maintenance

By Dmitry Przhedetsky*
If you look through both you will always find some discrepancies. And if you’ve been in a budget or production planning meeting, you know how difficult it can be to answer the practical business questions that arise, such as:
• How do we best spend a reduced maintenance budget?
• What maintenance should we perform in a limited available time?
• What are the risks of delaying or limiting the time allocated to a shutdown?
• How do we respond to increased production schedules?
• What does it mean if we can’t perform certain maintenance?
• How do we argue for maintenance versus other corporate expenditure?
• How can we cut maintenance costs without exposing the organisation to unacceptable risks?
The problem with maintenance for large, complex, high risk and high cost plant is that we do it, but often we don’t know. There are often a number of unanswered questions like ‘are we spending the money on the right things?’, ‘is it too little or too much?’, and ‘what is the effect of doing or not doing certain tasks?’.
The problem comes about because senior management, production management and maintenance management often have different priorities. Senior management see maintenance as a cost and asset management practitioners see maintenance as a complex operational, technical and management process. Both sides find it difficult to identify the largely intangible and unmeasurable benefits of maintenance.
In mining, the maintenance cost itself is often significant as is the cost of lost production. But apart from meeting regulatory requirements and warranty obligations, where does that leave you?
Yes, you need to meet those requirements, but what about the safety of people, the life-cycle cost of your plant and environmental protection? What personnel, plant or environmental risks are you still exposed to that you don’t know about?
Up until now, these questions have not always been easy to answer. Recently I have become familiar with a new concept offered by an Australian company based in Sydney – Capability By Design (CBD).
They are specialising in the linkage of asset management to the needs of the business. The company has been working on a way of responding to maintenance issues for the past 15 years. What distinguishes their approach is in seeing maintenance as a tool in the management of risk.
One application of this risk-based approach delivered annual maintenance savings of more than 50 per cent for a major defence asset while still meeting regulatory requirements and staying within acceptable levels of risk.
Delivering such positive outcomes comes about because both executives and asset managers adopted a common language based on risk management principles and quantitative methods to:
• express business needs and respond to those needs
• determine the optimum maintenance plan for an organisation that delivers the outputs set by senior management within cost and risk boundaries also set by senior management.
The approach takes into account all those factors that affect risk – risk to production outputs, safety, plant and the environment. It considers:
• knowledge of existing or proposed plant and plant condition
• the outputs (production) required from that plant
• a knowledge of how the plant functions as a whole from a reliability point of view
• how various components can fail and the likelihood they will fail
• the current maintenance plans and the effect they have on component failure and the associated risks.
Actual data can be supplemented by widely available industry data on similar equipment. This information can be collected, analysed and proposals for change developed, assessed and then implemented.
When the maintenance task is viewed through this risk-based model, it has the potential to be fully integrated in the business and to deliver significant returns on that investment.

* Dmitry Przhedetsky (M Eng (Mining), FAusIMM) is a director of Rock Cognition Pty Ltd. Contact him at: dmitry@rockcognition.com.au