Power Generation Station - Maintenance Strategy

Effective maintenance of plant equipment can significantly reduce the overall operating
costs of the station, enabling maximum equipment availability at the lowest cost. Instead
of viewing plant maintenance as an expense, a more positive approach is to view the
maintenance department as a profit center by adopting a more proactive approach to
performing maintenance. The goal of the maintenance department then is to add value.
This value can be measured by availability, safety, and the reliable operation of our
assets. With the ever changing corporate and market demands on the station, we have to
be able to constantly adjust to meet those needs. An effective maintenance strategy helps
us meet our goals by providing a vision for optimizing our available resources in order to
achieve our maintenance objective.

Important factors influencing the establishment of a maintenance strategy are shown in

Figure 1

Corporate Maintenance
and Objectives
Operations
Objectives

Maintenance
Processes

Technology
Maintenanc Action
e Plan
Internal Resources Strategy

External Resources

Figure 1
The maintenance strategy should be aligned with the Company’s corporate goals. In
order to develop an effective strategy the maintenance objectives and acceptance criteria
within the organization must first be visualized. This means that prior to establishing a
maintenance strategy the elements in Figure 1 must be known.
Another way to view this is to ask the question ‘if you don’t know where you are going,
how do you know when you get there?’

Maintenance Objectives
To better get at Objectives, ask the ‘so what’ question; Why perform a Gap Analysis?
Why identify weaknesses? Why assign criticality?
 Preserve the functions of our assets throughout their useful lives
 Selecting and applying the most cost-effective maintenance techniques
 Increased productivity (reductions in unplanned downtime and reactive
maintenance; reductions in maintenance costs due to equipment failures and cost
of failure vs cost of planned work; elimination of repetitive equipment failures).
 Reduction in accidents (enhanced safety)
 Compliance with regulatory requirements

Important factors influencing the maintenance objectives

The operations department plays a key role in helping the station to meet its maintenance
objectives. The objectives stated above all have a direct impact on operations and should
therefore lead to a combined effort by both departments working together to achieve a
common goal. The ops being a ‘customer’ label can sometimes be easily interpreted as
maintenance being subservient to operations, however that is not the intended role and
instead it should be more of a partnership.

Additional factors are:

 Budgetary constraints

 Continuous education of workforce in the area of knowledge retention and

continuing technical education

 Adoption of new technologies; Determining whether to be leaders, mainstream, or

followers should be based on sound business decisions with some acceptable level
of risk

 Interaction with other Company Maintenance groups

 Selection of Corporate CMMS Systems (eg Maximo)

 Operational schedules (demand)

Action Plan (how to get there from here)

1. Perform a gap analysis to identify weaknesses in the maintenance process

2. Select and implement a regime of continuous maintenance improvement actions
to address weaknesses in our maintenance processes (develop roadmap)
3. Identify critical plant equipment / assign criticality and group into 3 major
categories (H/M/L)
4. Develop specific maintenance strategies for each type of asset based on its
criticality
5. Develop an effective system of measures (Metrics/KPIs) to track program
effectiveness
6. Continuously fine tune maintenance process by feeding back lessons learned into
process. (cont improvement cycle shown below)

Note: Effective operation and use of the Computerized Maintenance Management System
(Maximo) is critical to the success of a maintenance improvement program.
Maintenance Strategies
The key strategy for success must be equipment specific – ie what is the best combination
of tasks to achieve the functional requirements of each asset – given that we understand
the equipment’s criticality. Options are:

 Time based or preventive maintenance (manufacturer recommended PMs such as

greasing/lubrication, inspections & rebuilds). Key for Independence is to
determine PM effectiveness by ensuring the PMs are addressing the failure modes
of the associated equipment and are the PMs being done at the right frequency.
Depending on the criticality of the equipment the right decision may be made to
not do any PMs.
 Predictive Maintenance (vibration analysis, thermography, oil analysis etc) on a
scheduled or ongoing basis to discover conditions indicating that a failure is about
to occur. Initiate preventive maintenance when failure is deemed imminent.
 Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) – maintenance is performed based on
degrading performance of the equipment identified by PdM or performance
monitoring including operational rounds.
 Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) -RCM provides a structured framework
for analyzing the functions and potential failure modes for a physical asset in
order to develop a scheduled maintenance plan that will provide an acceptable
level of operability, with an acceptable level of risk, in an efficient and cost-
effective manner.
 Run-to-Failure - fix the equipment when it fails but do not perform any scheduled
maintenance. This strategy is acceptable for selected assets deemed non-critical or
where the cost of the preventive work exceeds the cost of failure.

Roles and responsibilities

1. Plant Manager

 Overall program sponsor for the Station

2. Enterprise Maintenance Director

 Responsibility to share best practices/lessons learned across the regions
 Owner of the standard work process standard
 Work with the Regional Maintenance Directors to promote an
environment of maintenance continuous improvement
 Work with the Regional Maintenance Directors to promote an
environment of maintenance continuous improvement
 Stay networked with Industry peers and professional organizations
3. Regional Maintenance Director
 Responsibility to share best practices/lessons learned across the Plants
within the Region
 Audit consistent compliance to the work process standard
 Work with the Plant Maintenance Managers to promote an environment of
maintenance continuous improvement.
 4. Maintenance Manager

 Manage the human, physical and financial assets of the department so as

to meet the above objectives
 Lead the development and introduction of new maintenance initiatives
 Continue to be an inspirational leader to the team
 Ensure maintenance activities are aligned with maintenance objectives

5. Maintenance engineer

 Identify processes and routines to improve equipment reliability and

maintenance effectiveness
 Utilize knowledge of plant processes to help diagnose problems and
provide cost effective resolutions
 Research new technology (user groups/conferences) and improvement
techniques and make recommendations to Maintenance Manager

6. Maintenance planner

 CMMS (Maximo) subject matter expert

 Must be able to extract maximum value from the system
 Build/expand knowledge base and share with users
 Review the maintenance objectives and ensure maintenance actions are
aligned with those objectives
 Expand knowledge by attending user groups and vendor
conferences/training

7. Maintenance technician

 Perform safe, high quality work in assigned area of expertise using the
work order as the guide
 Avoid re-work (do it right the first time thus avoiding repetitive failures)
 Provide feedback to Maintenance Planner on ideas and opportunities to
improve the maintenance process and the quality of the work order

Operations Dept roles in maintenance

1. Operations Manager
Keeps the maintenance manager informed of equipment issues. Ensure the ops
dept remains vigilant in their efforts to ID equipment potential failures ideally
before functional failure occurs. Assists the maintenance manager in ensuring
plant resources are optimized so as to ensure effective completion of maintenance
tasks assigned to his crews.
 2. Performance/Predictive Maintenance Engineer
 As both predictive maintenance coordinator and performance engineer plays a
crucial role in identifying potential failures as well as areas that might most
benefit from capital improvements.
 Identify processes and routines to improve equipment reliability and
maintenance effectiveness
 Utilize knowledge of plant processes to help diagnose problems and provide
cost effective resolutions
 Research new technology (user groups/conferences) and improvement
techniques and make recommendations to address
 Monitor equipment performance to identify potential failures.

3. Senior Operators
Operators are the eyes and ears of the maintenance process and should be the first
to identify potential equipment failure prior to functional failure occurring. One
role of the senior operator is to ensure his crew remains vigilant in this task.
Ensure that maintenance activities assigned to his crew are effectively completed,
subject to the priority of keeping the plant running

4. Operators
Being the most exposed to the plant processes should provide continuous
feedback on equipment health and performance with the goal being to proactively
identify equipment malfunction at the potential vs functional failure phase.
Ensure that maintenance activities assigned are effectively completed, subject to
the priority of keeping the plant running

Safety’s Role in Maintenance

The Plant Safety Officer is a key feedback component to the Maintenance

Process regarding the use of critical behaviors through observations made during
observations made in the field and at plant meetings.

References:
Optimal Maintenance Decisions Inc. www.omdec.com
MaintenanceResources.com
ReliabilityWeb.com

Review date: 31 December 2009