Achieving operational excellence through maintenance optimization

The current situation forces many companies to reduce their budgets and operational costs in order to improve their margins.

The process industry is no exception. CAPEX budgets have been postponed and, as existing equipment can no longer be easily upgraded as it once was, manufacturers must now maintain existing facilities. Thus, “operational efficiency” or operational excellence becomes one of the main levers of productivity, and considerable optimization of the maintenance process becomes essential to help restore margins.

Operational excellence: finding the balance between productivity and equipment reliability

For the majority of European industries, the maintenance optimization process can be considered as one of the main steps to achieve operational excellence. In the petroleum, refining, machine building, transportation, pharmaceutical and chemical industries, and many other sectors, the costs of servicing and repairing equipment are high and therefore have great potential for optimization. In addition, for many European companies, equipment is a key element of the production cycle. Bringing it back to a maximum level of productivity has become one of the primary missions of plant management and industrial groups. It is clear that only those companies that can maintain optimal product quality while using fewer resources will emerge from this crisis as winners, and one of the fundamental requirements for this is a well-designed equipment maintenance process.

At the strategic level in the maintenance process, there is a key task for the site manager: finding a balance between productivity and reliability of the equipment, and its management cost. On the one hand, it is possible to use preventive maintenance, which is more reliable but also more expensive than corrective maintenance. On the other hand, it is possible to carry out curative actionsof replacement or repair of equipment in case of failure, which is less expensive but at the expense of reliability. Therefore, effective repair management requires the combination of several maintenance approaches in this process.

The “conditional” approach to maintenance as the best solution

The most relevant approach is a conditional approach, adapted to each class of equipment, taking into account its technical characteristics, its criticality and its function. This approach makes it possible to plan maintenance actions according to their real state, i.e. to control the operation of the existing asset and, without waiting for a breakdown, to make it evolve.

The maintenance strategy that combines several approaches, constantly updated, thanks to a global platform

At the same time, it should be noted that a conditional approach requires an equipment monitoring solution, a global vision on the state and operation of the equipment, and a tool for assigning and tracking maintenance interventions. This is where the strong value of asset management software, enabling improved asset and personnel efficiency, such as SIRFULL’s PowerMaint™ platform, comes in.

With a global platform, communicating with various sources and databases related to the assets, a content analysis of the indicators can be performed. This analysis allows us toidentify areas of processoptimization that require improvement.

With the goal of achieving complete operational excellence, SIRFULL’s PowerMaint™ platform is based on the two main process axes: strategic and application. At the strategic level, we define the concept and ground rules of the global maintenance strategy, best practices are identified and the effectiveness of the strategy is monitored and controlled on a global basis.

The treatment of the exception is consequently framed and controlled.

The application of the new maintenance rules in practice: the problem of manual entry

Once the maintenance strategy and rules are defined, the question of theapplication of these rules arises, and an update, of maintenance plans and modifications of work orders, is inevitable.

Today, these types of modifications are made manually in CMMS-type software, with the difficulty of having a harmonized approach, and represent a tedious and time-consuming task. This aspect hinders the process of internal process improvement and represents a significant barrier, both human and financial.

Automatic generation of up-to-date maintenance plans is now possible

To answer this need, the SIRFULL platform brings a disruptive solution: all the modifications of Maintenance Plans will be able to be implemented in mass and automatically. The automation and optimization of the maintenance process starts with the establishment of the Maintenance Plan and the change of maintenance rules is simple and fast, with a single click!

Automating maintenance plans and optimizing maintenance processes: the winning combination for operational excellence.

In conclusion, if it is obvious that the majority of companies have already started to automate the maintenance of their equipment, the majority of them do not pay enough attention to theoptimization of maintenance processes, hoping that these functionalities will become available in their existing digital solutions. Unfortunately, standard solutions can’t fit everyone at the same time.

The PowerMaint™ Platform can be easily integrated into an already existing ecosystem, helping to visualize processes and reconstruct the overall maintenance process. It can also, with analytical data, highlight the optimization directions to be taken, and then make their implementation very simple.

This is why, if we are aiming for complete operational excellence of our industrial sites, the two axes of operation – strategic and application – are essential.

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