“Since we introduced the CMI board and carried out asset criticality analysis here there have been improvements seen in the maintenance department, particularly in the planning & scheduling of work.
We still have slight issues on the production floor with requests coming directly from production to the fitters/electricians instead of going through the job request books but it is improving.
The Job request system, through the CMI board has been received positively on site. The main benefits we have found on this have been less distraction from production on requests throughout the day as we have made it clear they need to come through the request books. This allows full attention on individual jobs instead of being pulled away to another request.
The asset criticality was probably the best exercise we carried out, particularly in one of our areas. We knew we had some ‘show stoppers’ in the first part of the process but the analysis showed up some assets for other areas as much more critical as we would have placed them beforehand.
The main factor which we neglected was the increased labour (safety) factor which was brought about when certain machines stop.
Taking this on board we put together a PM plan for the critical assets, built spares for these machines and scheduled daily/weekly/monthly checks for these assets..
This, coupled with increased attention on downtime from management has driven stoppages on our main assets down, reduced mechanical/electrical downtime and increased our throughput.
The main benefits we have taken from the CMI and asset management training has been the ability to stay ahead off the game, scheduling much more work than we used to, and in turn preventing more failures than before.
For all of this to work Maintenance and management had to agree on changing working hours & culture from before in order to gain the full benefit, which was and still is a struggle to get right.
We are still some way off where we aspire to be but are continuing to improve week on week, making changes where we feel necessary to the system we have in place.
On full review we have to say that through the training and various improvements ESS helped implement there has been definite progress made.
The most difficult part of the whole process is maintaining levels of discipline among everyone to ensure that the standards and processes do not slip. This is the main stumbling block we seem to hit and if we can overcome that, we are confident the system will work to the level we need it at.“
