{"id":19030,"date":"2016-11-18T16:09:26","date_gmt":"2016-11-18T21:09:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/digitalization-of-maintenance-systems-in-capital-intensive-heavy-industries\/"},"modified":"2016-11-18T16:10:24","modified_gmt":"2016-11-18T21:10:24","slug":"digitalization-of-maintenance-systems-in-capital-intensive-heavy-industries","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/digitalization-of-maintenance-systems-in-capital-intensive-heavy-industries\/","title":{"rendered":"Digitalization of maintenance systems in capital-intensive heavy industries"},"content":{"rendered":"

Based on a consulting project done for one of the largest global chemicals’ corporations – names and specifics sanitized to maintain client confidentiality.<\/em><\/p>\n

Everyone who has ever worked at or with heavy industry facilities knows just how important the equipment maintenance is for plant economics. Efficient maintenance is one of the most significant drivers of both the top line (through increased capacity utilization) and bottom line (through cost savings on maintenance labor and spare parts\/materials) of a manufacturing plant, especially in industries such as O&G, mining, chemicals, metals etc. that rely heavily on continuous processes often running 24\/7 and involving highly destructive environments leading to rapid equipment degradation. Equipment breakdowns in these industries are not unexpected emergencies, but a daily reality they are dealing with. Yearly maintenance materials\u2019 costs can reach 3-5% or more of the total asset base, and maintenance labor might contribute 30-50% of total labor costs on the plant. Efficient maintenance can also easily make a 5-10% difference in equipment utilization and the plant output. Coincidentally, many of these industries also produce commodity products which compete mainly on cost, and output volume is the only revenue driver the plant can control.<\/p>\n

Digital revolution has enabled the Client to dramatically increase both maintenance effectiveness (as measured by equipment uptime) and efficiency (cost savings) through a number of initiatives, of which I will focus only on the most important two: the \u201creliability-centered maintenance strategy\u201d (RCM) managed by an automated planning application, and the Industrial Internet-enabled predictive\/condition-based maintenance.<\/p>\n

Where old pre-digital maintenance function relied on either reactive maintenance (\u201cfix it when it breaks down\u201d, which leads to massive losses of productive time and possible spread of the damage to other valuable equipment) or ad hoc preventive maintenance scheduled by the supervisors based on their personal experience and\/or observations of the production staff (\u201cthis sounds like it\u2019s gonna blow!\u201d), the automated RCM operates in a much more systematic way. The entirety of equipment in the facility was cataloged in the application (in this case, SAP-based) in a hierarchical manner, from the entire production shops down to individual pieces of equipment and further down to individual components such as bearings and mechanical seals. For each component, equipment piece and so on, a list of potential failure types was compiled, and each failure type was assigned a criticality level, ranging from unimportant failures that do not lead to lost productive time and\/or additional costs, to those that can have catastrophic consequences for the facility and its workers and cannot ever be allowed to happen. Depending on the specifics, an equipment component can be assigned through a decision-tree algorithm to one of the maintenance types:<\/p>\n