Conscious Asset

“Gremlins today” is a series of short articles on problems that plague industrial operations the world over.

Originally, Gremlins were fictitious mischievous trouble makers who caused Royal Air Force aircraft breakdowns during World War II. Author Roald Dahl published a book about them in 1943, based on his own experience as an RAF pilot. Pilots in the RAF used to carry lucky Gremlins to ward off their effects. Dahl worked with Disney to publish a cartoon book based on them, but it never made it into a movie at the time. Never-the-less, it did loosely inspire the 1984 movie, “Gremlins,” by Steven Spielberg.

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Are you having trouble producing good quality maintenance job plans?
Is your “standard job” plan library nearly empty?
Is your planned work running below 65% (bottom quartile)?
Note: scheduling without a plan, isn’t planned, and failing to plan is planning to fail!

With maintenance costs burning up to 30% or more of your operating costs (depending on industry) there can be a big benefit from reducing those costs. Every dollar saved goes straight to the bottom line, and upwards of 20% (sometimes more) can be achieved by doing a good job at maintenance work management. But many companies don’t even come close. At the heart of their problem is their approach to maintenance planning. Not the planners! They do their best but are often untrained and unfamiliar with good practice in planning.

However, even if your planner are well trained, they can be easily side-tracked by parts chasing, purchasing, schedule shuffling and even standing in for supervisors!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has now come to planning!

If you are a planner, don’t worry. It won’t take your job, but it will help you become a superstar planner!

We all know that maintenance plans are critical to efficient work execution and keeping a lid on costs. Planners create those plans and then go on to schedule the work when it best suits the organization.

Creating maintenance job plans requires a great deal of knowledge and insight into parts, tools, trade skills, lifting apparatus, and so on. Only a planner on site has access to it all, because only he can actually see where the work will be performed. However, creating job plans is a lot of work. The average fully trained planner who is actually dedicated to planning (not scheduling), can produce maybe 4 or 5 good plans in a week. With hundreds or even thousands of jobs to plan, he can be planning for his whole career. Using old Work Orders as a sort of template helps, but planner productivity can still be low.

Introducing artificial intelligence to generate draft job plans quickly, gives the planner a huge boost in productivity – how about 40 good plans in a week, instead of 4 or 5? Combined with proper use of your CMMS / EAM’s capability to save standard job plans, your operation can rapidly move away from low single digit % planned work to reach benchmark levels > 95%. That can boost worker (trades) productivity from 30% (typical) to nearly double that. Considering the skilled trades shortages and trouble hiring them that everyone is experiencing these days, that’s a huge spin off benefit!

Conscious Asset has teamed with Perspect Analytics and Cato AI Solutions to create AIJobPlanner(tm). This cloud based tool takes seconds (up to a couple of minutes for very complicated jobs) to generate draft maintenance job plans that include: tasks / activities complete with sequencing, timing, resources (parts, special tools, materials, trades) all that are needed to complete the job. It automatically searches the web and our library for technical manuals and other information relevant to the equipment you specify. Our advanced tool will also accept input of your  site specific information such as technical manuals, Bills of Materials, etc. The tool produces a very comprehensive DRAFT job plan in seconds.

Caution: These DRAFT plans are very complete, but they still need review and possibly editing by a real planner. That effort to review and edit takes minutes, not the hours it usually takes to create a new plan from scratch.

Click here: aijobplanner.net To see the tool, a demo that loads automatically, to sign up for a free trial, or as a Beta Tester.

We are accepting up to 100 Beta Testers and have some special offers to make it more enticing for you to try the tool. Use the link above or the QR code below to go to the Beta Test site and sign up. Click on the “sign up free” button at the upper right of the screen. To get the special offers, we only ask that you try it, and give us your feedback.

The special offers are:

• For the first 20 testers: free basic subscription for 1 or 2 users for first year. $720 savings.
• For testers 21 to 100: 50% off basic subscription for 1 or 2 users for first year: $360 savings.
• For all 100 testers: If you want more than the “basic” subscription, we will also give a substantial discount on Premium or Enterprise subscriptions. Since these require multiple user setup, just ask us if this option is of interest to you and we’ll set you up.

If you like the tool, here are our subscription plans:

• Free – for a single user to give it a test ride (limit of 10 plans)
• Basic – for a smaller scale operation, with 1 or 2 people planning maintenance work, with a limit of 500 plans per month. Available with credit card payment: $60/month.
• Premium – for a larger site, with up to 10 people planning, and unlimited plans. Can create up to 50 custom templates and up to about 100,000 pages of your own technical documentation for the AI to use in creating your plans. Can pay with credit card or use PO. $500/month.
• Enterprise – for very large sites, or multiple sites, with more than 10 people planning and unlimited plans. Can create up to 1000 custom templates and up to about 5,000,000 pages of your own technical documentation for the AI to use in creating your plans. We can also include the ability to search your existing Work Orders (additional cost). Requires a quotation, PO and custom set up.

The reality: Savings in work execution can easily be 30 to 60% of what you are spending today! That’s less labor, less overtime, less contracting, less consumption of parts and materials, less spend on delivery logistics, and less procurement activity. If your maintenance costs are in the range of 10 to 30% of your operating spend, you can save 3 to 18% of your operating labor costs by focusing on maintenance planning, scheduling and improving your proactive maintenance program.

The myth: many believe that planning and scheduling will solve their maintenance productivity problems, so they focus efforts to improve them. But despite their efforts, results don’t change. Time and again, we see reports showing relatively high levels of planned work but low schedule compliance, and production outputs don’t change. What’s going on?

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Here’s one you probably don’t expect from me. A children’s book! “Our World” is intended to spark curiosity In children about the world around them. It asks questions like, where does the water in my shower come from, how does the electricity in my light bulb get there, and many more. It uses everyday childhood experiences to spark questions.

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You probably have a computerized system for managing maintenance. It might be part of your integrated management software, like Oracle, or SAP. The business cases for initial purchase of these systems often include forecast cost savings of 20% or more. Most of the time, they fall far short of that. In fact, the costs of the new system, its implementation, the staff required to support and run it, the training needed for users, can easily grow bigger than the costs you had before the system was implemented.

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“Inspect and repair as required” are well intentioned but make up what is usually an ill-informed instruction to maintenance workers. On 10 April 2024, our Principal Consultant, James Reyes-Picknell, delivered a 1 hour “lunch and learn” webinar for PEMAC – Canada’s Asset Management Association. The subject is inspired by the words often seen in work orders that often lead to a whole lot of unnecessary misery. There’s a long introduction by PEMAC, which I strongly encourage my readers to join if you are not already a member. The content of the presentation begins at: 10:49.

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Industrial operations that use physical assets for production or service delivery need their assets to run optimally, and cause minimal operational disruptions when they don’t. Spending too little overall, or on doing the wrong things, always backfires. These short-term savings inevitably lead to breakdowns disrupting operations that cost much more in lost revenue than was saved by under-spending.

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Businesses often attempt to maximize profits for owners or shareholders by taking measures to reduce costs. A reactive approach to plant and equipment breakdowns is very costly, and it reduces outputs. By failing to do what it takes to become proactive, they take risks against the odds of frequent failure, high repair and downtime costs. A proactive approach is more productive, predictable and less expensive, as it relies on strategic maintenance.to increase equipment life and running times, reduce failure risk, and lower operating costs.

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Saving 20% of your maintenance costs is achievable in many operations. Are you running your production equipment to failure? Is your maintenance spending consistently higher than you budget allows? Are you frustrated that breakdowns cause delays in delivery schedules? If you answer “yes” to any of those questions, then savings and production gains are possible. The 20% figure is arbitrary but truly indicative of what is possible. Reliable production equipment is far cheaper to maintain simply because it is reliable, but it must be maintained. It requires the right maintenance being done the right way, and at the right times. Get that right and you save operating costs, AND you gain productive uptime with its attendant revenue.

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Article first posted at Conscious Reliability by James Reyes-Picknell, Jesus Sifonte, and team.

Evaluation Criteria for Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) Processes

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, one of the accepted definitions for standard is: “something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model, for example.” In our case, a standard comprises a document or sets of documents providing requirements, specifications, guidelines, or characteristics that can be used consistently to ensure that materials, products, processes, and services fit their purpose. There exist international standards on quality (ISO 9,000), risk (ISO 31,000), environment (ISO 14,000), energy (ISO 50,000), management and many other fields providing information and guidance on the practices, methods, and processes designed by groups of highly qualified international experts. Most technical field professionals utilize international standards to base their practice on trusted mathematically and/or scientifically proven methods. Trial and error are no longer acceptable out of the laboratory anymore today. But, lessons learned from its practice in conjunction with regretful real-life incidents and accidents provide knowledge on their risks, mitigation, and prevention. Most asset and maintenance management best practices and techniques are standard-driven, meaning they have been carefully defined and established. The SAE JA1011 Standard on Evaluation Criteria for Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) Process has an exciting background, including disappointing and successful stories before its principles were conceived and eventually incorporated into an international engineering standard.

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Article first posted at Conscious Reliability by James Reyes-Picknell, Jesus Sifonte, and team.

by Jesus Sifonte

We have seen that RCM is defined as a process to determine what must be done to keep assets doing what their operators want them to do in their current operating context. What about RCM-R®?  How does it stand when compared with SAE JA1011?

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Article first posted at Conscious Reliability by James Reyes-Picknell, Jesus Sifonte, and team.

Condition Monitoring – A Closer Look

By Jesús R. Sifonte

Condition Monitoring is a broad term referring to the systematic process of data collection for the evaluation of asset’s performance, reliability and maintenance needs with the purpose of planning repair works. Its main purpose is Potential Failures finding. It requires the collection of good asset’s health data which trending is studied. The primary advantage of Condition Monitoring is that it incorporates health indicator monitoring activities performed while the machine is operating. Assets failures are predicted well in advance of their occurrence. It allows for planning repairs safely and economically for the plant. Also, machine parameter data trending allows extending assets operation as close as possible to their actual useful life. Condition Monitoring data provides vital information for taking important decisions affecting plant operation goals. Maintenance decisions are taken based on the actual asset condition avoiding unnecessary repairs leading to start up failures. Catastrophic failures of a critical assets presenting accelerated wear trends can be avoided by using C tasks too. Sometimes operating conditions changes causing components life expectance to reduce as noted by steeper indicators trends leading to unexpected catastrophic failures. This can be detected by CM and earlier planned shutdowns can avoid such disasters.

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Article first posted at Conscious Reliability by James Reyes-Picknell, Jesus Sifonte, and team.

Suppliers and users of any product want that it performs well during its lifetime. That is, the item must perform within specified operating parameters during its life cycle.  The life cycle of an item comprises Concept, Research & Development, Production, Operation & Maintenance and, Disposal phases. Each phase carry costs its owner wishes to minimize. The idea is to realize the most value from the item when the whole life cycle costs and benefits are considered. In most cases, usually 80% of the total costs are incurred during the operation & maintenance phase of the life cycle. Machine failures cause plants to stop production causing accidents, economic impacts and reputation loses.  Asset components gradual degradation with age, operational/maintenance errors and design flaws all can cause assets or processes to fail. A failed asset is considered unreliable, which means that it is no longer able to fulfill its intended function.

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