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such organizations, it seems that the level of plant
availability drops to the stage where it stabilizes at a low
level - a level where it is not breaking down because it is
not running; i.e. it is being repaired!
For many, the obvious solution
is to seek to increase personnel numbers. However, this
approach is not often the best. In today's economic climate,
the management culture is mostly focused on cost reduction and
managers seeking only to increase staff numbers, rarely
succeed.
Today many Asset Managers are
embarking on an improvement program focusing on improving the
maintenance processes and increasing the effectiveness or
productivity of asset and human resources. Improving
maintenance processes involves process re-engineering and
increasing resource effectiveness in the following way:
- Removing all maintenance
tasks that serve no purpose or are not cost effective.
- Eliminating any duplication
of effort where different groups are performing the same
Preventive Maintenance (PM) to the same equipment.
- Moving to a mostly condition
based maintenance philosophy.
- Adding maintenance tasks to
manage economically preventable failure modes that
historically have been run to failure.
- Spreading the workload
around the trades and operators.
The long-term vision is to
adopt such process in a way that achieves this goal in a
systematic way and which can remain as a ‘living program’
to capture the benefits of future learning and technical
advances on a continuing basis.
The methodology used to address
the vicious cycle of reactive maintenance has been developed
over a period of five years with the co-operation of several
of Australia’s most notable asset intensive industries.
The program is endorsed by SIRFrt
and is the preferred maintenance analysis method of one of the
World’s largest mining companies. The methodology, training
programs and software package are known as PMO2000. Further
information can be found at www.pmoptimisation.com.
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