We believe this to be the offering with the most upside potential.
If your plant is not producing at an optimum level, AF will work with
you to achieve your desired results. Profit
sharing is an option. The process includes the below steps.
a. Perform an ARM Benchmarking assessment. This will identify where the opportunities are in the areas of employee utilization, processes, equipment condition and contractor management.
b. Using the list of opportunities gained from the Benchmarking assessment, AF will structure a “turnaround” program using the maintenance and reliability strategies outlined in our “offerings.” The most commonly used approach includes the below steps:
(1) Implement Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) to identify the right work to perform
(2) Conduct a “Material Condition Inspection (MCI)” of your plant’s critical assets. This is performed by equipment walk-downs, employee interviews and an evaluation of failure history and maintenance costs. Once completed, an action plan will be negotiated to optimize the material condition of critical assets to include ROI and a time-line to achieve it.
(3) Implement Management-Of-Daily-Activities (MDATM). This process will optimize your planning and scheduling process and will increase your craft productivity by a substantial margin. This is vital to ensure management of your backlog of work as well as to ensure there are sufficient resources to perform all critical work.
(4) Enhance the inventory management process if it is an issue.
(5) Develop a Plant/Corporate Reliability Program including assignment and training of a Reliability Leader. This is a key position that oversees and continuously improves your maintenance and reliability strategies.
(6) Assess your craft skills and provide skills training as required. Based upon numerous Benchmarking assessments, AF has found that the average craft has only 40-50% of the skills possessed by a 4-year apprentice graduate (certified journeyman). Ensuring work is performed “right the first time” will return great dividends including positive impact to the bottom line.
(7) Develop a strong Predictive Maintenance (PdM) program. PdM, where applicable, is always the maintenance of choice. It identifies eminent failures and allows repairs to be performed before failure occurs. This has been proven to reduce the cost of maintenance by an average of 40% as well as to increase plant availability by limiting downtime of critical assets.
(8) Improve utilization of your Computerized Maintenance Management Software (CMMS). Effective use of your CMMS is the cornerstone for Continuous Improvement. “You can’t know what to fix if you don’t know what is broken.” This includes:
-Training craft and operators in how to write effective Work Requests.
-How to properly plan jobs.
-How to develop KPI and metrics to continuously assess the performance of your critical assets.
-How to resource load your craft and contractors to optimize maintenance both during the normal operating cycle and during outages.
(9) Improve the management of contractors. For plants who rely heavily upon the use of contractors, this initiative can achieve tremendous benefits in the quality and quantity of work performed leading to a great return on investment. This is one of the most overlooked areas of all and provides a great deal of low-hanging fruit!
(10) Establish an effective Continuous Improvement (CI) program. Everyone does CI, but few do it effectively. The key is to involve all employees in a way that makes them feel part of the team. AF has many time-proven techniques which will provide you an effective and value-added CI process.
The above initiatives are examples of the method used to move an underperforming plant to World Class performance. The actual initiatives employed will depend upon the Benchmarking assessment. A balance is sought between implementation cost and value returned over the short to mid-term.
The duration of the plant turnaround project is usually 8-24 months. It will depend upon your starting point and objectives. AF will negotiate specific metrics in advance so that everyone can see the progress, month by month until completion.