Maximo Reporting

You can avoid some expensive burn-outs if you opt for preventive maintenance and not reactive maintenance

WE will cross the bridge when it comes. That’s a nice philosophy to have in life.
But not in a plant. Certainly not with machines.
Every machine comes with a suffix called maintenance attached to it.
That’s why the term called AMCs (Annual Maintenance Contracts) is a highlight of many a sales negotiation talk too.
And yet, maintenance is orphaned once the machine gets out of the crib.
The crying baby gets the milk. So is the approach we often take with maintenance too.
But, maintenance is not just strutting about with some nuts and bolts to be used when something screeches, or howls or makes a noise.
Its scope is broad and deep and that’s probably why we still don’t embrace the right approach to maintenance.

Maintenance Approaches:
Maintenance can be broken into categories – Proactive and Reactive. Proactive is further divided into two classes- Preventive and Predictive while Reactive can be split into – Corrective and Emergency.
Reactive maintenance, the easiest approach, the oft-used approach, the out-of-sheer-habit approach. But look closer and you will find that the worst thing that a company can do is spend a lot of time in reactive maintenance.
Reactive approach includes a lot of unplanned downtime in contrast to planned downtime.
Often many reasons incline a company towards reactive way of maintenance. Like:
1. High pressure environment
2. Rigorous production schedules
3. Heavy targets
4. Top Management’s attitude
5. Poor record-keeping making proactive approach infeasible
6. Lack of automation in production-records and scheduling documents
7. Lack of awareness of means and methods of non-disruptive maintenance
8. Ease of application and out of regime
But, this kind of a company is not always a world-class company. Because world-class companies only apportion about 5 per cent of maintenance time to the reactive approach. The major part is done the preventive way. The reasons for doing that are born out of a long-term mindset, focus on sustainability, regard for safety, well-planned direction and a clear vision.
Why Reactive Maintenance costs a lot?
If a plant takes on the routine of repairing only when a problem occurs, it has to bear many outcomes of this neglectful approach:

1. Disruptions in schedules (Example- the way Japanese companies in Electronics and Automotive OEM industry are struggling with capacity-issues and inventory lags)
2. Loss of production man-hours
3. Impact on productivity and quality
4. Greater defects and market pull-outs of products with consequent impact on company image
5. Safety threats ( and associated issues with worker morale and confidence)
6. Over utilization of energy and bad environmental practices
7. Internal supply chain spill-over
8. Resulting
9. Inadequate leverage of AMC benefits

Ways to ensure Preventive Maintenance
It is not that difficult to take the preventive recipe and have planned downtimes. It’s much more beneficial and has a very positive long-term effect, not to mention environmental and sustainability contributions that come as a bonus when a machine is maintained at regular intervals. The ways to do it are simple:

1. Allocate planned hours from night-shifts or evening-or holiday-hours for planned shutdown or a machine outage
2. Automate and organize production records and schedules so as to allow preventive maintenance in an environment of clarity, non-overlap, transparency and control
3. Accumulate certain level of inventory for planned production interruption in advance.
4. Ensure administration of AMC personnel as per time and repair requirements
5. Use redundancies and back-up options for maintaining mission-critical equipment (example- in a turbine or a nuclear reactor or a steel furnace)

Choosing Preventive over Reactive maintenance is a major difference between an average company and a world-class firm.
Which side you want to be is ultimately your choice.
Yes, you can always cross the bridge when it comes but it would not hurt if you have a spare tire and a car in good order. Won’t it?

When built into management processes, performance metrics become a system which will generate organizational behaviors that comply with what is measured, i.e., “you are what you measure.” Hence, this will encourage behaviors which help present a good score for the individual or for the department.

This may or may not, however, help to achieve strategic goals. Therefore, when building performance metrics, we must begin with the end result in mind. We need to focus on what we want as outcomes of our work processes. This presents a dilemma, as we do not work as a set of isolated departments, but in collaboration with others. Processes that begin with an individual are continued or completed by others. So, how do we effectively measure outcomes when a single individual or group is not controlling all the key steps?

Several basic frameworks have been proposed to build intelligent metrics that help form sets of composite measures to simplify this problem. For example, the SMART (see accompanying section “Building and Testing Performance Indicators”) test is frequently used to provide a quick reference to determine the quality of a particular performance metric. But these do not, however, address how the measures will interact to stimulate an effective network of key processes. How can individuals see what the effects of their improvements are, if these get lost in the noise of company management reports?

One problem is that business processes are segmented, and many departments are collecting silos of information that produce metrics used only for the sake of measurement. These silos then reinforce divergent opinions of company performance and limit a common understanding of what new behaviors are needed. So, a major factor in implementing performance measurement is changing the way performance is measured and reported and how people view success within their own processes.

For many organizations, this is “where the rubber hits the road:” How can we build realistic, practical metrics which drive change? How can we articulate company objectives through enterprise-wide metrics in an integrated measurement system?

What is a failure code? Quite simply, it is a code that illustrates why an asset failed or the reason that the asset failed. Codes can be a number which is cross referenced to a list of actual code descriptions or more conveniently a series of alphanumeric characters that are a logical abbreviation of their descriptions. However, with modern database technology and available disk space, the full descriptions are increasingly being used instead of alphanumeric codes.

Where are they used? They are generally used in maintenance systems or more commonly computerized maintenance management systems. They can be used on a work order for an asset or equipment failure. The codes are normally input by the person reporting the problem at the time of failure or by the technician when closing the work order.

Why are they used? Failure codes provide a convenient method of getting statistics about equipment failures or breakdowns. CMMS systems will generally have a reporting function that allows reports to be run on specific failure codes for your equipment. Let's say that you have a machine, which has problems with alignment. You could run a report for a period of time and, by selecting a failure code, determine how many times your machine has had misalignment problems. These statistics are invaluable in any continuous improvement program.

The complexity of the codes will be dependent on the know-how of the system users. For example, if unskilled operators are using the codes to report equipment problems they will have to be of a general nature. Conversely, if trained technical people are the users then the codes can be more complex. For this reason some companies prefer to use both failure codes and problem codes. Problem codes are more a list of symptoms than causes. These would typically be used by operators with the technicians entering the additional failure code after the work was completed.

How are they Formed? Whatever method you chose, your operators and maintenance personnel will soon become familiar with your own codes providing that the list is limited to a manageable number. I firmly believe that there is no need to have more than perhaps 20 or 30 codes and that these need only be of a general nature. For example, if you use your CMMS to report on occurrences of "Misalignment" on a particular piece of equipment those who are familiar with the equipment will know where the misalignment was likely to have occurred, making more specific information unnecessary. Problems will occur when users selecting a code are presented with a drop down list with 50 or 100 codes on it and choosing one becomes difficult. In this case you will find the catch-all "other" being selected too regularly.

If your CMMS supports a hierarchical failure code structure or where codes can be associated to areas or equipment so much the better. In this case you will require more of them simply because they are equipment specific but there may be only 5 or 10 codes for each type of equipment. Functionally this is not a problem because after selecting an asset in the CMMS, users will still only have to choose from the limited number of failure codes associated with that asset.

I have deliberately limited the codes in the illustration below to four characters in an attempt to show that this can provide a good indication of the full description. To prove the effectiveness of this have a look at all the codes and descriptions just once then cover up the descriptions and you will find that you are able to remember most of them. After they have been in use for a week or two you will memorize them all effortlessly.

Alphabetic list of typical Four-Character Codes and Suggested Abbreviations

No CODE DESCRIPTION
1 ARLK Air Leak
2 ALRM Alarm or Problem Indicator
3 BRNG Bearing Problem
4 CALB Calibration Problem
5 DIRT Dirt or Foreign Matter Problem
6 ADJS Equipment Adjustment Required
7 CUTO Equipment Cutting Out
8 JAMD Equipment Jammed
9 HUNG Equipment PC or Microprocessor Hung Up
10 XLUB Excessive Lubrication
11 NOIS Excessive Noise
12 VIBR Excessive Vibration
13 LLUB Lack of Lubrication
14 WIRE Loose or Broken Connection or Wire
15 ALIN Misalignment
16 NAIR No Air
17 NPWR No Power
18 OLLK Oil Leak
19 OPER Operator Error
20 XHOT Overheating or Smoking
21 BROK Part of Equipment is Physically Broken
22 SHRT Short Circuit
23 VNDL Vandalism
24 WTLK Water Leak
25 NOGO Will Not Start

The above codes are of a very general nature and some of them may be considered to be more like problem codes than failure codes but you will find that almost all your failures can be linked to one of them. It is also recognized that you will have local requirements that may mean adding a few more of your own. If this is the case you may also find that you can drop some of those provided if they are inapplicable.

Additional functionality can be added to the codes to suit your own site. For example a number 1, 2 or 3 could be added to indicate priority or seriousness of the failure. A problem with excessive vibration could then become 1VIBR, 2VIBR or 3VIBR dependent on the reporter's perception of the seriousness of the problem. Alternatively (or additionally), you could add a letter A, B or C to represent the shift when the problem occurred.

In conclusion, the methods outlined in this document are those recommended by the writer. We do recognize that here are other ways of doing things and we are always interested to here about these.

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Maximo manages large amount of work orders challenging to prioritize ,plan and schedule work order with constraints like labor availability, materials ,tools, services and asset availability .These may impact your operations ,maintenance ,reliability & engineering in one or many ways like:
- Pending PM compliance
- More failures and less reliability
- Increased productivity loss
- Increased wrench time
Join us on the webinar to overcome these issues.
Key takeaway:
- Understand & manage WO backlog
- Effective ways to improve planning & scheduling
- Understanding future work
- Understand planning compliance