Using Work Management Best Practices to Achieve Asset Optimization (6)

Stage Five: Asset Optimization

Asset optimization—the tying together of service, quality, performance, and cost—is the ultimate goal of any asset-intensive company. But to get there, companies must have progressed through the other four stages, putting in place the processes that will allow them to achieve this goal.
Once this groundwork is laid, they have all the resources and tools required to drive continuous improvement.

“As success is gained from the initial improvement efforts, organizations must institute a process of continuous improvement to guide the [EAM] process. Continuous improvement is driven by prioritized failure analysis that includes proactive identification, prioritization by risk, and action to eliminate the defect. The strategy and implementation is adjusted and refined, as necessary, to ensure progress.”
(Pennsylvania State University Applied Research Laboratory2 )

At this point, the foundation is firmly in place. Companies are now able to understand what areas
they need to focus on for greater improvement.

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Using Work Management Best Practices to Achieve Asset Optimization (5)

Stage Four: Best in Class

Once a company has established a culture of reliability and has put in place maintenance best practices to optimize asset utilization, it can begin to work toward becoming a best-in-class organization. What does it mean to be best in class? It means being able to maximize profit margins and asset availability. Just as importantly, it means being recognized as an industry leader.

Each industry has its own benchmarks to define what a best-in-class company looks like. PeopleSoft and PCA have identified just a few of the benchmarks that asset-intensive companies should measure themselves against (see below table).

To become best in class, companies must be able to measure themselves against benchmarks such as those shown in above table. They must have access not only to the raw data but also to the KPIs and management reports that allow them to translate data into actionable information. And, in the current environment of increasing regulatory control, Sarbanes-Oxley, and mounting financial and shareholder pressure, having the actionable information to continually improve performance levels is essential.

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Using Work Management Best Practices to Achieve Asset Optimization (4)

Stage Three: Culture of Reliability

Once a company has the best practices in place to create proactive maintenance plans and schedules that are designed to maximize capacity and minimize cost, it is time to move to the next stage—creating a culture of reliability. This stage is critical for achieving asset optimization, but it cannot be attained by software alone.



It is at this point that companies can begin emphasizing a total productive maintenance (TPM) approach. TPM empowers employees who operate assets to take responsibility for these assets’ maintenance and performance. Because TPM depends on autonomous maintenance, equipment performance data, focused teamwork, leadership, training to improve skills, and knowledge and design for operability and maintainability, a successful implementation requires the foundation established in Stages One and Two.

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Using Work Management Best Practices to Achieve Asset Optimization (3)

Stage Two: Proactive Maintenance

Proactive maintenance is of vital importance to asset-intensive companies. By performing preventive maintenance, companies are able to prevent problems with assets and minimize the risk of sudden failure. Firms are then in a better position to optimize asset availability, increase productivity, and reduce maintenance costs and capital outlays.



To perform preventive and predictive maintenance effectively, companies need to implement an
integrated solution that allows them to generate, store, and act on the data they need to support their maintenance programs. Best practices that facilitate proactive maintenance can be associated with:
• Equipment history tracking for capturing data about equipment that helps with making decisions about maintenance and eventual retirement.
• Preventive maintenance for developing maintenance plans that reflect calendar- or usagebased
schedules.
• Condition-based maintenance for continually monitoring physical attributes that collectively indicate the condition of an asset and using this information to perform maintenance only when factors indicate a potential problem.
• Reliability-centered maintenance for developing maintenance plans based on the reliability and criticality of various components of each piece of equipment.

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Using Work Management Best Practices to Achieve Asset Optimization (2)

Stage One: Core Competencies



The first stage represents the foundation for any asset management program. At its core is work management—managing the maintenance workload. In this first stage, workflows, work types, failure codes, backloads, and system access codes are set up from preconfigured tables. Also in this stage, the planning function is established and planners are trained to scope, estimate, and schedule work.
At Stage One, most companies use early generation Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) or paper-based systems to manage these functions. The key to advancing to the next stage is adopting industry-recognized maintenance best practices and software to regulate these functions. This approach creates the springboard for future asset optimization capabilities.


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Using Work Management Best Practices to Achieve Asset Optimization (1)

Work management best practices, demonstrate how businesses within specific industries should design their asset management processes to optimize asset utilization, decrease operating and maintenance costs and capital expenditures, and increase profitability and productivity. But asset utilization doesn’t happen overnight. It can be achieved only through the implementation of these best practices throughout the organization. A company that has little or no formal process regarding maintenance, for example, will have a longer road to achieving asset optimization than a company that has many of these processes already in place.

Each stage acts as a foundation for the next.

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