What Constitutes World-Class Reliability and Maintenance? (part 6)

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Note: This column is a continuation of the January, February, March and April and May P&P maintenance columns by Christer Idhammar. In these columns, Mr. Idhammar asked readers to evaluate how well their mills had implemented the systems and practices required to become a "world-class" facility.

In this column, I continue discussing the systems and practices that indicate to me that a mill is “world class.” To evaluate how far your mill has to go to achieve this designation, I would suggest reading this column with a group of operations and maintenance employees that includes both management and craftspeople.

On a scale of zero to ten, rate your mill’s use of the following systems and practices, with ten meaning that you are so good that it would probably not pay off to do more improvements in this area. A five indicates that you feel you do a good job, while a zero means that your performance is a disaster.

18. Use of time. This column includes a table that describes the typical, good, and world-class distribution and use of time in a maintenance department. If you take some time to study the figures in the table and compare them to how your maintenance department honestly uses its time, you might be in for a surprise. Before you do this, however, it is necessary to go through the definitions for the categories of work used in the table.

• Daily and weekly work means all work you can do independently, whether or not the process is in operation.

• Shutdown is all work that requires the process to be down in order to do a safe job.

• Only planned work is all work executed after it has been planned, though it has not been scheduled. In a pulp mill with a continuous digester, or for a paper machine and other processes that are difficult to start and stop, this category of work is less common than in a packaging or finishing area where there are many minor stops and it is easy to stop and start equipment. However, it is still very cost-effective to use this category where applicable.

• Only scheduled work is all work executed as scheduled before it has been planned. You can say that you have turned the planning and scheduling process upside down. If you do it correctly, however, you plan before you schedule.

• Break in work is all work that is added to the schedule after it was closed. Closing time for a schedule is recommended to be about 19 hours in advance of execution for daily and weekly work. Closing time is about one week for shorter shutdowns (10 to 12 hours) and four weeks for a longer shutdown (over five days).