All manufacturers are faced with a common challenge — how to keep plants producing at maximum output while conducting predictive and preventive maintenance. By being proactive and planning preventative maintenance; companies can greatly reduce the cost of lost opportunities and maximize revenue.

Prometheus Plant Maintenance Advanced offers Plant Maintenance solutions to maximize revenue in the SAP PM module through:

- Graphical work order scheduling
- Work order printing packages
- Easy material searches
- Work order modification en masse
- User/role specific entry screen to access any transaction

Join us on December 5 to see how these solutions will help reduce screen time for personnel up to 60%, improve long range planning and maximize revenue. Register now!

Hi there! Thanks for checking out our blog. Given that this is our first post, please allow us to introduce ourselves…

We’re Prometheus Group and our goal is to solve your SAP Plant Maintenance headaches and help your maintenance organization work smarter.

Our SAP certified solutions are deployed in:

• The top 6 global revenue leaders in the oil and gas industry
• 6 of the top 10 global chemical companies
• The top 3 paper companies
• 3 of the top 10 mining companies; 6 of the top 20
• More than 1,000 installations serving asset-intensive manufacturing industries worldwide

Driven by Prometheus employees who also happen to be SAP super users, the mission of this blog is to foster an online community where we can all discuss our passion (yes, passion!) for plant maintenance. This blog is ideal for anyone interested in sharing maintenance and project tips, as well as tricks and lessons learned over the years. Simply, our goal is to share how you can increase productivity, improve reporting and reduce costs so that your organization can be more successful and your job less stressful.

Many of our solutions were born from the ideas and suggestions of our end users, so we encourage you to please share your thoughts, ideas and opinions with your fellow readers and contributors. There’s a space for your comments below each blog post. If you have a private comment or question, feel free to email us at: contactus@prometheusgroup.com.

Happy reading!

While wrench time rates vary by company, a typical average is 30 percent. That means in a 10-hour day, only 3 hours of actual work is being done. (Shame on us!) Several factors contribute to lackluster wrench time, including waiting on parts and materials or unexpected travel. But, all is not lost, proper planning and scheduling of maintenance can help alleviate this issue. In fact, a company that is properly planning and scheduling its work can see wrench time increase to over 60 percent.

One of the most effective ways to improve plant maintenance operations and wrench time is to streamline your organization’s planning and scheduling work order processes. To reach optimization, you need a solid foundation of plant maintenance knowledge along with communication and accountability across departments. It’s no surprise that plant maintenance planning and scheduling is a not a “one size fits all” model.

Optimized planning and scheduling is a process that doesn’t happen overnight. It depends upon a few factors, including your manufacturing organization’s size; the relationships between maintenance, production, and procurement groups; and reversing the reactive work mode.

Here are four reasons why you should strive to optimize your organization’s planning and scheduling practices:

1. Efficient plant maintenance practices enable resources to achieve more with less
2. Proactive scheduling of production processes reduces equipment failures and helps to ensure that plant maintenance work is planned according to priorities and synchronized with production schedules
3. Using SAP as the foundation for plant maintenance planning and scheduling safeguards company data from becoming compromised due to incompatibility with other non-real-time programs, such as Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Project
4. Scheduling in a reliable application inside SAP helps avoid the loss of organizational knowledge when workers retire or leave the organization

To summarize, it’s about being proactive.

Plant maintenance planning and scheduling helps alleviate reactive situations such as when a rush priority job loses its urgency after materials arrive on location. Studies have shown that reactive work costs companies three to five times more than planned work. That hurts! With a real-time work order scheduler, you will have the knowledge and ability to communicate immediately with multiple departments, such as production, to reallocate resources to other jobs.

Also, proper SAP plant maintenance planning and scheduling eliminates the need for your company to hold an excess inventory of parts and tools and allows you to cancel requests for permits that are no longer needed. Having greater visibility into the in-house inventory will enable you to use parts and tools now freed up from previous work orders on future work orders. Also, being able to search on long text in SAP to find parts required for a repair greatly minimizes the need for free text input. And, with all departments using the same real-time application, you can quickly and easily schedule jobs and coordinate and minimize downtime with production.

Navigating SAP can be a cumbersome process, especially for users new to the software. On average, SAP users spend 50 minutes per day getting to the right screen. With the Prometheus Group Navigator, it take a little as 5 minutes. We created Navigator to help you work quickly and easily in SAP. Navigator provides customizable shortcuts and a straightforward work flow process. This video will give you insights into how this solution can help simplify many different processes, including Shutdowns and Turnarounds (STOs), capital projects, as well as day-to-day maintenance. Let us know what you think!

It happens to the best of us, a problem occurs or equipment breaks. When this happens, we create a notification and enter it into SAP. But this is where things get tricky. Most companies find planning and scheduling work orders in SAP to be non-intuitive and time consuming. So, they export their data to a third-party program, such as Excel or MS Project to plan and schedule work, rather than in SAP. But doing so is like trying to find your keys in the dark, visibility is limited. The problem is most companies do not take the time to update the data in SAP, or the data is not updated in a timely manner.

So what happens if a schedule needs to change and the data is stuck in Excel? How does your procurement team know that you need the material two days earlier? Is the storeroom aware they need to pull the material by a certain date? Does your services contractor know they need to be on-site on a different day? If your planning and scheduling tool does not adequately address these questions, then not only could you fall behind in work, but your operations’ metrics may suffer or your KPIs may not be accurate. Taking data out of SAP results in:

• Increased downtime because teams end up being out of the loop on planned work, particularly if any changes occur.
• Increased reactive work, which increases costs for maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) due to expedited shipping to get unplanned material on-site and overtime to get the work completed.
• And, decreased wrench or tool time due to planning and scheduling inefficiencies and an overall lack of visibility between departments.

While many companies use SAP to manage routine plant maintenance, they often turn to external systems to handle big projects and shutdowns. It’s hardly a surprise that many shutdown specialists prefer to use an outside project planning solution rather than work inside SAP. I’m sure many of you have been using third-party project management tools long before an integrated SAP R/3 system existed. And as many of us know, a longtime reliance on an existing practice can make people reluctant to experiment with new solutions or technology.

Part of the resistance to keep projects inside SAP is that organizations tend to outsource shutdown projects to outside contractors – who have their own solutions. Another factor is that shutdown specialists are not aware of the work management capabilities of SAP, as well that integrated SAP solutions are available. And to top it off, there is also the general belief that these augmented solutions are not built for the huge volume of detailed planning and scheduling data that goes along with a massive project or shutdown. Right?

Wrong! These incorrect assumptions not only hurt your organization from a data integrity perspective, they also reduce efficiency and your ability to follow best practices.

I’ll continue this conversation next week and cover the specific challenges of using scheduling systems external to SAP.

Did you know that your maintenance organization could be wasting nearly 25 percent of its available labor? Moreover, it is estimated that up to 60 percent of wasted labor results from activities that add no value to the overall plant performance, according to the Reliability Institute. In today’s economic climate, waste is not an option, which is why many organizations are adopting lean manufacturing principles.

So what exactly is lean manufacturing? In its simplest terms, lean manufacturing eliminates waste and identifies processes for optimizing manufacturing operations. The biggest hurdle to getting started with lean manufacturing is identifying the various types of waste and non-value-added activities within your organization.

Waste is anything that doesn’t add value, such as outdated processes or carrying excess inventory (parts, materials or equipment). Reactive work and underutilized labor are also examples of waste, such as when an employee has 20 minutes of work and then 15 minutes of downtime waiting for equipment to become available. But that never happens, right?

Consider the following time-wasting scenarios and see if your plant is guilty:

• Under-production – performing routine plant maintenance (PM) activities too often or not having maintenance synchronized with production negatively impacts equipment uptime. When a component or part has to be reprocessed, usually for quality issues, the job is getting done twice from both a time and a parts/materials perspective.

• Waiting – lacking the proper processes and workflows for optimized planning and scheduling. It’s a waste of time and money when a part, component, or permit is not ready or available for a job.

• Transportation – having crafts travel to get necessary tools or materials that should be at the work site or, similarly, delivering an unfinished product from Point A to Point B. The employee cannot work on (add value to) a product without the proper tools or materials in hand, and an unfinished product does not gain any value while it is in transit. Another example: If an employee has to walk across the production floor to pick up a printout of a work order and then walk back to the work bench, no value is being added by the additional travel. Strive to keep travel time to less than 15 percent per day.

• Process – lacking a proper maintenance plan or having low wrench time efficiency. Maintenance plans that have been in place for a while may include redundancies that are using up valuable time. Every business is different, but the typical average for actual work wrench time performance is between 25 and 35 percent, with top companies performing in the 50 to 60 percent range. Consider a technician throughout an average day. In an 8-hour shift, this equals 2.4 hours of wrench time and 5.6 hours spent on indirect activities.

• Inventory – lacking visibility into stock across multiple locations, having secret material stashes, and carrying obsolete inventory stock. A lot of inventory on hand or hidden away means money spent with no return on investment and potentially a higher inventory tax. Also, you lose money when the items can’t be returned or used.

• Motion – performing tasks that aren’t required or don’t add to the production value. If you can get 500 employees to reduce avoidable motion (unnecessary movement) by a minute a day, it translates to 8.3 man hours a day.

• Defects – repeatedly doing repair work on the same equipment. The time an employee uses to correct errors is time not being spent on new work.

By identifying your company’s manufacturing weaknesses you’re then able to make the necessary corrections. Can you think of any other wasted and non-value-added activities within your organization?

Printing documents inside SAP can be a cumbersome process. Work package creation, printing and distribution often steals countless hours of productivity from plant maintenance planners and schedulers. In standard SAP, documents must be accessed from multiple locations and then individually printed. Typical SAP printing scenarios involve entering each work order and performing a series of steps to gather all the documents. Compounding the problem, SAP forces you to select and preview documents before they can be printed. Once printed, the documents have to be manually sorted and assembled into work packages.

This video shows how the Prometheus Print Manager facilitates the creation of PDF work packages in SAP by allowing you to gather all documents related to work orders on a single screen. From one screen, you can highlight multiple work orders and create a single PDF file that includes all linked documents. Then, preview, print, or distribute the work package electronically with one click. If you would like to perform a mass print, you simply select all the documents and click the print icon. You can also auto-collate documents and add barcodes and watermarks for easy handheld interpretation.

When there’s barely enough time in the day to get to all of the necessary tasks, why waste time on activities that should be automated?

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Schedulers are responsible for ensuring various trades are available to complete a planned job during the schedule duration. They should also communicate the work plan and any changes across the organization. Here are five tips for effective scheduling in SAP:  

1) Keeping data in SAP – By scheduling jobs in SAP, schedulers can determine when and where various crafts should perform work. This allows schedulers to ensure that tasks are completed by various crafts in the correct order for safety and efficiency.

2) Scheduling based on equipment availability – An effective scheduler ensures that the materials and services needed to complete the job are available. If materials and services have not been properly planned, then tradesmen will be unable to complete the job on schedule.

3) Scheduling craftsman at maximum capacity – Over extending the workforce can contribute to confusion and missed opportunities on the plant floor. Effective schedulers assign work evenly between crafts to ensure that time is not squandered and production is not interrupted.

4) Scheduling and publishing jobs and coordination with Craft/Operations/Production – Publishing the schedule for execution and ensuring communication transparency keeps work visible and builds trust across the functions. Schedulers should post the schedule in a common area and clearly communicate the plan across the organization.

5) Creating a break-in team – “Firefighting” or dealing with unplanned work is expensive and negatively affects wrench time, so eliminate it as much as possible. Create a break-in team that focuses solely on unplanned maintenance so that routine maintenance never gets pushed to the back-burner.

So, what is lean manufacturing? In a nutshell, lean manufacturing eliminates waste and identifies how to improve processes. Narrowing in on the methods and activities that are the least efficient provides a unique opportunity to streamline workflow and remove high-stress periods.

Why is lean manufacturing important? Your organization might have run lean in the beginning when it was small and had the right-sized equipment and a production stream that was able to address value-added activities. But, then as it grew, waste might have entered in the forms of overwhelmed work areas, unexpected equipment downtime and start and stop projects that resulted in excess inventory.

Inefficient maintenance practices are costly to your factory and unscheduled breakdowns negatively affect your company’s bottom line. It is worthwhile to investigate what lean manufacturing can do for your organization to improve your ROI.

Companies need effective lean manufacturing to be, and remain, competitive. Lean manufacturing requires reliable machinery, as well as a large percentage of employees committed to learning, implementing, and maintaining an environment that minimizes waste and removes inefficiency.

How can you implement lean manufacturing in your plant? The most common first step for implementing lean manufacturing in any organization is to evaluate the process using 5S, which uses these five basic principles:

• Sort – dividing parts and processes into necessary, useless, and outdated categories, and then addressing each part and process as needed.
• Set – putting tools in the right place. For example, storing the tools used most often in a place closest to where they are used, and putting the tools back where they belong after use. Also, making improvements to the MRO storeroom, such as organizing and labeling everything.
• Shiny – cleaning everything, keeping maintenance areas free of clutter, and making this the standard optimal working condition.
• Standardize – creating an ongoing and regular policy of keeping the facility clean and working optimally on a daily basis.
• Sustain – ingraining the four principles listed above into the organization’s culture and the mindset of all employees.

When lean manufacturing is implemented correctly, it can help you improve efficiency on the plant floor by enabling you to maximize existing equipment and personnel resources to the fullest. For instance, by scheduling production instead of building inventory, you can focus on smaller batch sizes, which can reduce equipment costs and maintenance cycles.

Improved manufacturing processes can lead to streamlined work flow that has operations moving smoothly from one step to the next and maximizing productivity. Using lean manufacturing processes through a comprehensive solution that works inside SAP can reduce effort and save time.

One of the most effective ways to improve plant maintenance operations is a well-executed planning and scheduling process in SAP, which provides production visibility to all personnel involved in the process. Developing a focused improvement plan may include:

• Improving the Bill of Material (BOM) quality
• Providing visibility and coordination with production so that lockout/tagout (LOTO) is reduced
• Improving the communication of assignments to craft personnel
• Ensuring materials are available
• Ensuring tools are available
• Printing work package instructions and making them readily available

Has your organization implemented lean manufacturing processes? If so, what factors contributed to your success or failure? If not, what’s holding you back?

In a manufacturing environment, having the right tools available to complete a job is essential. A well-defined tool management strategy can help avoid unwanted interruptions that can decrease wrench time – the time actually spent doing work.

While best-in-class companies are using SAP for planning and scheduling, tool crib management can still be overlooked – forcing companies to use third-party solutions or manual effort to manage these materials. Standard SAP lacks the functionality to manage tool cribs without implementing a third party solution. This can cause additional headaches and costs because it requires adding middle-ware to work between SAP and the tool crib management solution. In addition, using a tool tracking solution outside of SAP eliminates real-time data, reduces data visibility, and increases the likelihood of double-booking tools.

How can you maximize tool allocation?

If you are not actively tracking tool cribs, then without a doubt, it is negatively impacting wrench time. While numbers on wrench time vary by company, it has been shown that the average is about 30 to 40 percent a day. That means only 3 or 4 hours of a 10 hour day is actually spent doing hands-on work. While there are many variables that impact this figure, such as travel, meetings, or waiting for others to do their job, having to wait on tools greatly contributes to daily productivity loss.

Consider this all too common scenario: A technician has received a work order to complete. In gathering the materials, he runs into a snag when trying to find a power tool needed to complete the job. The plant does not have a real-time system in place to manage tool allocation, which leads to confusion about what tools are available and where they are located. The technician is then forced to track down another power tool or wait until another person has finished using that particular tool – thus wasting time because the technician cannot move on to the next job until he has completed the existing work order. Speeding up a workforce’s access to tools – and eliminating the headaches of doing unplanned or reactive work to find tools –will improve a company’s overall efficiency and decrease downtime.

By implementing a solution that tracks tools, you will have a better handle on planning and scheduling work orders. Ideally, the tool crib solution should track who has the tools and when the tool is due back. In addition to providing greater visibility for planning and scheduling, by giving accountability for the tools, you will be able to save money on replacing lost or stolen tools. This video explains how you can track tools more efficiently and accurately inside of SAP with the Tool Crib Manager:

How does your company manage tool cribs? Could you be doing a better job?

While SAP is the leading enterprise resource planning software of choice, it does come with its challenges—especially for plant maintenance users. The SAP module for scheduling and assigning resources is not intuitive, requiring users to navigate multiple screens and make changes one work order at a time. To get the maximum value out of your SAP investment, it is vital that organizations improve user adoption by implementing a simple and intuitive scheduling tool.

The Graphical Work Order Scheduler (GWOS) gives SAP PM Users the ability to visually inspect and graphically schedule work orders in a Gantt chart view from inside of SAP. By eliminating the confusing process of completing multiple SAP transactions to accomplish a simple task, GWOS helps your workforce become more efficient. Data is simultaneously displayed in tabular format for detailed analysis, as well as graphically for scheduling overviews. The result is a better, simpler, faster, and more cost effective plant maintenance operation.

This video explains the layout of the GWOS tool and provides instruction on how to create work orders and relationships using drag and drop functionality, auto-level work schedules to control capacity, and mass change work orders and user status.

A deep dive into how maintenance organizations improved their planning and scheduling processes to save time and money.

Ballance Agri-Nutrients

Ballance Agri-Nutrients Limited is New Zealand’s leading farm nutrient management specialist. It is a 100-percent farmer-owned co-operative, with more than 18,000 shareholders throughout New Zealand. The company places a strong emphasis on helping farmers to operate more profitably and sustainably through a scientific approach to farm nutrient management. Science and innovation drive the company’s culture to achieve the best possible solutions for its customers.

Leading European Paper Company

A top three global paper company with a long history in the European forestry industry is going beyond just making paper in today’s electronic world. The company is leading the integration of bio and forest industries into a new, sustainable and innovation-driven future. The company creates value from renewable and recyclable materials, creating products such as bio-fuels  energy and timber. Much of the company’s growth and innovation has come from mergers over the years. With expansion come challenges when acquiring new sites and integrating them while striving for consistent vision and process.

Energy Company

An integrated energy company focused on globalizing environmentally friendly products, including diesel, was looking for a solution to better manage its large plant shutdowns. The company thrives on innovation and doing business in a way that is smart and efficient.

Newcrest Mining

Newcrest Mining Limited is Australia’s largest gold producer and one of the world’s top 10 gold mining companies by production, reserves, and market capitalization. Newcrest has a portfolio of low cost, long life operating mines, a strong pipeline of growth projects, and highly prospective brown and greenfield exploration projects. The company has a substantial reserve and resource base combined with a long reserve life.

European Building Materials Company

One of the world’s leading suppliers of building materials, including cement and ready-mix concrete, has grown considerably in the past 100 years of operation. Since its founding in Europe, the company has expanded its reach to all seven continents. Maintaining consistent planning and scheduling practices across multiple sites can be a challenge for any organization, but it was especially challenging given the sheer size of the company. However, leaders at the company realized that in order to better achieve coordination across sites and to optimize best practices, the organization needed to adjust its existing processes.

Sedgman

Established in 1979 in Brisbane, Australia, Sedgman Limited is a leading provider of mineral processing and associated infrastructure solutions to the global resources industry. The company provides engineering, procurement, and construction management (EPCM) services for mining coal, iron ore, copper, gold, lead and other base metals. Sedgman has gained international recognition for its coal processing and materials handling technologies. With a focus on innovation and growing its highly experienced and dedicated workforce, the company prides itself on developing and introducing the latest technologies to deliver peak technological performance on all projects.

Hemlock Semiconductor

Hemlock Semiconductor is a joint venture of Dow Corning Corporation, Shin-Etsu Handotai and Mitsubishi Material Corporation. Hemlock Semiconductor is a leading provider of poly-crystalline silicon and other silicon-based products used in the manufacturing of semiconductor devices and solar cells and modules. The company began its Michigan operations in 1961 and broke ground at its Tennessee location in 2009.  Hemlock Semiconductor has more than 1,000 employees across five different locations.

Century Aluminum

Century Aluminum is a holding company for Glencore International of Switzerland’s aluminum-producing assets. As a publicly traded company, Century Aluminum has plants in Mt. Holly, South Carolina; Hawesville, Kentucky; Vernon, California and Ravenswood, West Virginia. In 2004, Century Aluminum acquired Nordural Aluminum, a 90,000 ton primary aluminum plant in Grundartangi, Iceland.  This aluminum plant has since been expanded to 260,000 tons.

OneSteel Steel & Recycling

OneSteel SAP solution was not a fix-all. A top requirement among Plant Maintenance users was to have the ability to print documents such as work orders, PRTs and documentation in SAP. These papers are crucial to technicians in the field – and often required to be on-site to maintain statutory and quality requirements. Standard SAP did not provide an easy way to compile documents and print. Users wanted a printing solution that was simple and did not require complex customization within SAP. And they wanted a solution that was as close to out of the box SAP as possible, thus avoiding expensive customization costs initially and for future updates.

Global Paper Production Company

With thousands of employees scattered across 20 countries, it’s an understatement to say that coordination and communication among sites is crucial. As a global leader in paper and packaging products, the company profiled in this customer success story was no stranger to the demands of juggling a large international workforce. With many mills located across the globe, the organization needed to invest in solutions that gave users a real-time look at work orders and allowed updates in real time.

A deep dive into how maintenance organizations improved their planning and scheduling processes to save time and money.

Maintaining data integrity is a key challenge for most manufacturing organizations, and the problem becomes increasingly aggravated as the number of sites and users rises. Most companies strive for consistent practices across all sites and a tool that fits their processes. Naturally, this requirement becomes even more crucial as the volume of work orders increases.

One company in particular, a major European building materials company, averaged 20,000 work orders per site, per year. The company was using SAP as its ERP solution but was in search of solution that would better utilize the SAP infrastructure and improve user adoption and processes among all sites. Newcrest, OneSteel, and a large energy company all struggled with the same issue prior to implementing Prometheus PM Advanced.

OneSteel’s Whyalla operation, for example, was looking to move away from a legacy planning and scheduling system that had been in place for nearly 20 years. The technology had outlived its usefulness and was not sophisticated enough to meet the company’s requirements. Users developed their own workarounds with multiple tools to schedule work, resulting in inconsistent processes and inefficiency. For instance, users had to export data out of one tool, then manipulate it in a third-party program, and then import it back into the initial master data tool. Besides the risks of data integrity that come with moving data in multiple programs, OneSteel’s processes suffered because they lacked a dynamic view of work being done. They needed a real-time view of planning and scheduling.

So did Newcrest Mining. Prior to implementing PM Advanced across its four mining operations, Newcrest produced its weekly work schedules by exporting its maintenance data from its SAP system to Microsoft Project. This complicated the maintenance scheduling process as not all sites were running the same version of Project. Maintaining consistent data across two systems was time consuming and prone to error.

“It was difficult to reliably produce the weekly schedule because we had no overall control of the data and no single source of truth,” recalled Newcrest’s Maintenance Process Specialist, Craig Thompson. “MS Project wasn’t synchronized with our HR calendars, so we had no automated way of knowing whether the resources we had booked to perform a work order were actually available to perform it on the scheduled date.”  

In a more extreme case, an energy company, that also ran on SAP, was using shutdown management software that worked outside of SAP and required costly middleware. During a total plant shutdown, several limitations of the tool were uncovered. For example, the solution did not allow for real-time updates in SAP, which led to inaccuracies in resource planning and scheduling visibility.

End users and business unit leaders at the company knew that a better solution could drive improved business results. In the search for a new tool, users emphasized that they wanted to improve plant maintenance shutdown productivity, enhance scheduling visibility, and achieve better scheduling accuracy. The existing planning and scheduling process required using spreadsheets along with a third-party middleware solution. This prevented real-time SAP updates and true data accuracy. In addition, the users wanted the ability to easily accommodate unexpected changes to resources and material planning.

We’ll continue over the next few weeks with a closer look at companies that were challenged by inefficient planning and scheduling, lackluster printing functionality, and a growing backlog.

You guys asked how to change the stoplight colors to indicate capacity in the Graphical Work Order Scheduler (GWOS), our SAP scheduling tool for plant maintenance. Check out this video by GWOS expert, Bill Edwards, for a step-by-step tutorial on how to personalize the stoplight colors in GWOS to reflect resource capacity.

Why is capacity important? Over-extending your workforce can lead to confusion and missed opportunities on the plant floor. Likewise, under-scheduling resources can negatively affect production.

Here’s how to get capacity right:

What would you like to see in our next tips and tricks video? Please leave your suggestions in the comment section below.

Equipment maintenance is a major area of concern for manufacturers. A study of 70 manufacturing plants found that over 50% of the maintenance work performed by these firms was reactive (when equipment ran until it failed or had an emergency breakdown). There is a strong correlation between manufacturing cost reduction and following a preventive and predictive equipment maintenance strategy. Over a 5-year period, a study group of companies found that productivity improvements correlated strongly with a number of variables, one of which was following a preventive and predictive equipment maintenance strategy.

Recognizing the priority of your equipments’ criticality and vulnerability allows you to manage your plant’s output with the optimal outcome so that there will be as few interruptions as possible. In order to make best use of criticality, you need to use a method to determine the criticality for each plant item or process. In order to carry out this work, consider the following steps:

1. Identify the equipment - Prior to evaluation, create a list of all plant items that will be assessed.  The initial list should include any items that may cause significant interruption to production or output if the equipment were to fail.  Equipment that is less likely to cause interruption should also be noted, but can be included in later studies.
2. Form an assessment team – To get a full picture of the impact of the criticality, create an assessment team which includes several departments and individuals who have experience at various steps within your plant maintenance processes.  The maintenance management system can also be used as a tell-tale to see where equipment has failed previously.
3. Rate the equipment while considering business risk if an item fails – Before you can identify and assess equipment risk, you need to determine the vulnerability and the criticality of equipment failure. The determination for each rating is a score from 1 to 5 and is based on the equipments’ parameters with regard to the overall production process.

For vulnerability, assign:

• “1” if equipment is unlikely to fail
• “2” if equipment failure might happen
• “3” if equipment failure could occur
• “4” if equipment failure is highly probable
• “5” if it’s almost certain that the assessed equipment will fail

In addition, when scoring criticality, consider an equipment failure against the production process and assign:

• “1” for a very minor consequence
• “2” for a minor consequence
• “3” for an important consequence
• “4” for a significant consequence
• “5” for a major consequence

The assessment team should consider the impact of a failure to the business as well as any potential environmental, health, or safety issues. Also, during the team’s evaluation process, it’s important to give extra consideration to the reasoning behind any high rating a member gives to a piece of equipment.

Use the risk matrix below to convert the vulnerability and criticality score to an actual risk rating. The risk matrix allows an organization to see how the criticality and vulnerability scores translate to an overall risk rating.

After rating the criticality and vulnerability of each piece of equipment, you then use the ABC risk matrix indicator for analyzing and developing a plant equipment maintenance strategy. When the criticality and vulnerability ratings are plotted on the matrix, pieces of equipment whose scores fall in the 16- 25 range are labeled “high risk/important” and given a designation of “A.” Equipment that scores 9-15 for plotted vulnerability versus criticality will be deemed “medium risk/less important” and given a designation of “B.” And any equipment that falls within the 1-8 range will be deemed “low risk/relatively unimportant” and given a designation of “C.” As an example, if a piece of equipment has a vulnerability rating of “4,” and a criticality rating of “3,” this results in the equipment being placed into the “medium risk” category and given a designation of “B.” This means that this equipment should be highlighted on your list of equipment to maintain.

This A, B or C indicator should be populated into the Functional Location and Equipment master data in SAP, in the ABC indicator fields. It is worth noting that the equipment will take priority over the Functional Location if both are populated differently. This means that you may have an ‘A’ criticality Functional Location (the system), but a ‘B’ criticality piece of Equipment, in this, the B rating would be brought across to the work order. An example is where a duty and standby pump are installed in a highly critical system.

How does your company identify equipment risk? What have you found what works or doesn’t work?

While mobility can offer a number of benefits, a challenge for plant maintenance is to decide which routine tasks or functionalities need to be available via mobile. Mobile devices should not create more work or introduce more steps in the process – they should actually help workers save time. A study by Motorola found that manufacturers with mobility applications saved an average of 42 minutes per employee per day.

For a mobility solution to add value, it must be simple to use and easy to access. Too many screens or buttons, as well as needless applications can cause chaos and additional work. It is crucial to have a mobile solution that is customized for your organization’s business needs. According to the Symantec State of Mobility study, 71 percent of companies are already using or are planning to use custom mobile applications. Likewise, a mobile solution for plant maintenance should be customized to address key tasks that can improve efficiency and create better workflow. Some features that a mobile solution should offer include:

1. Access to real-time data

Instantaneous access to information, along with real-time notifications and confirmations for events such as breakdowns will make a mobile solution more valuable for routine plant maintenance. For example, a technician who is able to use a mobile app to see work orders or view drawings while on the plant floor will be able to make a repair faster than if he has to spend time gathering all the necessary documents for the repair. By providing real-time updates, technicians will save hours in desk time down the road and provide a more accurate status of progress tracking of a work order.

2. Access to routes and inspections

Planners and schedulers need to be able to use their tablets or smartphones to create, view and update maintenance routes and measurement points in real-time. In addition they need to be able to respond and approve notifications while they are out on the plant floor. This helps improve wrench time and gives a more accurate picture of what has been completed.

3. A simple interface

One of the challenges of mobile compared to a desktop is the smaller screen size. In plant maintenance, especially for companies that use SAP for planning and scheduling, often times it is challenging to make these detailed interfaces work on a tablet or smart phone. To ensure maximum user adoption, companies need to identify what key aspects of their daily plant maintenance process to display on the interface. The easier this information is to access, the quicker updates can be made. Too many buttons or lines of text can clutter an interface and make mobile adoption more difficult.

4. Image visibility

The saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” applies to plant maintenance. Why spend time typing up a description on how a piece of equipment is broken when a picture can tell the story? Mobile applications for plant maintenance should have the ability to attach pictures associated with equipment breakdowns. This helps create a record of breakdowns and provide better visibility on equipment reliability.

5. Barcode scanning

The ability to scan a barcode with a mobile device can help save time and improve searching for equipment information. Not only can barcode scanning help with the history of a piece of equipment, this functionality can also be used to search for parts.

6. Search options

Mobile solutions should make search easy in order to maximize user efficiency. A mobile solution with search options for the availability and location of spare parts will help improve repair timelines, for example.

7. Document viewing

The ability to view documents in a variety of formats such as PDF will help arm technicians with all the information they need to make informed decisions about work orders and assignments. Mobile solutions should provide access to key documents such as work order instructions, technical documents and safety instructions. Another added benefit of this functionality is that it helps cut down on printing.

8. Quick implementation and flexible deployment

Adding mobility should not be a lengthy process. By having a quick and flexible deployment of mobile solutions, organizations will immediately be able to see the benefits of the solution.

Mobility can offer numerous benefits for plant maintenance, including time savings and better visibility on daily activities. However, it is crucial to identify a mobile solution that is simple to use and can help improve user workflow. Want to see all of the functionality listed above in action? Justin Fox will be conducting a live webinar about Mobile on 7/31 at 9am EDT. Sign up here.

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This video shows how to update and maintain the shifts of each resource assigned to a work center using the shift updater capability found in the Graphical Work Order Scheduler (GWOS) tool for simple scheduling in SAP PM. The tool integrates with HR data to display resource hours and helps make educated scheduling decisions.

The workplace is not a track field. So why is you staff running around and taking extra steps to get the job done for plant maintenance? Empower your workforce with Prometheus Group’s Mobile solution, which is optimized for “inside the plant” activities and driven by our vast SAP plant maintenance expertise.

Take advantage of real-time data in your SAP system with mobile devices. Going mobile means information is gathered instantaneously – not at the end of the work day. Equipment breakdowns and repair notifications can be entered on the spot. Technicians can have access to work orders, notifications, and history and safety information at their fingertips.

Watch our 30-minute, on-demand webinar to see our mobile solution in action!

In this video, an SAP coach from AngloGold Ashanti speaks at the Mastering SAP Plant Maintenance in Johannesburg about the increased productivity and improved SAP usability the company experienced after implementing Prometheus Group’s SAP plant maintenance solution. He also provides tips for success.