Excellent maintenance and reliability create significant value in chemical and agriculture manufacturing. Indeed, roughly 50 % of fixed costs in a typical chemical plant are associated with maintenance, and unplanned equipment downtime is usually the biggest reason for lost production.

Chemical firms that get maintenance and reliability right can improve their profitability (by 4 to 10 %) and also the efficiency of the asset bases, leading to less redundancy and less unplanned outages (7 to 13 % greater overall equipment effectiveness).1 In addition, sites rich in reliability have correspondingly greater operating margins and safety records than their lower-reliability counterparts: 7 to 16 percent less unscheduled maintenance occasions, twenty to thirty percent better safety performance,2 and twenty to thirty percent lower costs.

Applying an effective maintenance and reliability transformation has not been easy - and several factors allow it to be even harder today. The typical site is affected by a cycle of excessive unplanned maintenance, which is 3 to 5 occasions more pricey than planned maintenance. Average asset existence has to bend in the last 3 decades, growing costs to keep reliability. And enormous maintenance workforces - saddled with complex work processes and archaic systems - spend significant time on low-value activities (wrench time is under 30 % for that typical chemical and agriculture player). Further complicating matters, much-skilled personnel are retiring (27 percent from the workforce will retire within the next 3 to 5 years). Without one, intellectual capital is going to be lost, and productivity will decrease. Finally, most of the digital solutions presently in position were initially presented as silver-bullet productivity enhancers, yet system-to-system incompatibility, clunky user interfaces, and poorly planned deployment and integration have brought to disappointing outcomes.

With all of this in mind, choosing the proper asset-productivity approach - one that integrates classic lean thinking with the proper digital tools - is important to achieving a higher level of maintenance and reliability performance (exhibit).

As typically lean fundamentals and exterior spend management possess the greatest potential impact, they must be the very best priorities for enhancement. Other parts of high-impact include deploying the best talent for reliability analytics and overinvesting in work execution planning and scheduling. Digitization and analytics, presuming they're built on the solid lean foundation, might help achieve and sustain lean productivity gains. Utilizing condition-based maintenance to avoid failures may also be productive. Finally, failure conjecture through machine learning can create value for several assets, presuming sufficient data exists to build up advanced analytics algorithms and the price of failure warrants your time and effort involved with developing and looking after models.

Choosing the proper approach requires a comprehensive understanding of the problem at hand. Companies searching to enhance maintenance and productivity typically face 1 of 3 scenarios, because both versions require pulling a distinctive mixture of levers.

One large global chemical manufacturer's excessive concentrate on short-term cost reductions through the years brought to some reactive maintenance culture. Consequently, insufficient reliability led to missed production deadlines and unmet customer commitments. Our prime amount of mechanical break-ins managed to get extremely difficult to organize work, and mediocre scheduling practices converted into inefficient execution, with wrench occasions between 15 and 20 %. Preventive maintenance wasn't done promptly, resulting in an unmanageable backlog in excess of 30 days of labor within the pipeline. Consequently, equipment was highly unpredictable, and frequent breakdowns limited production capacity.

The maker implemented a 2-step means to fix maximize effectiveness and efficiency. First, it redesigned its management processes (prioritization, gatekeeping, and planning) and clearly defined maintenance and reliability roles. Second, it adopted an electronic tool to enhance work scheduling, mix-functional coordination, and task speed.

This mixture of traditional and digital levers drove rapid enhancements. To begin with, planning and scheduling productivity improved by 30 %, and wrench time improved with a factor of two.5. The backlog was reduced to under two days and preventive-maintenance compliance elevated substantially, reducing unplanned downtime by nearly 10 %. Finally, as equipment reliability improved, also did client satisfaction. Consequently, the guarana plant obtained the sales team's confidence in being able to meet demand and undertake more production.

From: https://www.echemi.com/