Enhancing CMMS By Assigning Measurable Objectives

Klein

For those of you who manage to keep track of such things, the last time I wrote here, the topic was preparing to implement CMMS at your facility, or "what should I do before they get here?". Of course the next obvious question now would be "how do I start this thing?", assuming that "they" since have arrived and departed and left "their" CMMS product in your capable hands.

Well, all kidding aside, if you were prepared for their arrival with an accurate equipment inventory and a comprehensive listing of maintenance actions, you probably learned a great deal during their visit. They would have put your information files together with their program files and from that point on, they could never say anything like "now suppose you had this . . .". Instead they probably said things like "now this function takes your medical gas systems and integrates their usage with your requirements for maintenance and projects the most favorable time to schedule that maintenance.

Real answers to real questions on the very first day that your new CMMS is operating. Congratulations! Your preparations were great; in fact you were great! Well, please hold on for just a moment and try not to float so high that you can no longer see why you wanted CMMS in the first place. You certainly did not want it so it could tell you the best time to schedule maintenance because back then you did not have any planned maintenance to schedule.

Most projects have three or sometimes four phases that describe their "life cycle". The first is R&D (research and development), the second is usually called Procurement and the third is O&M (operations and maintenance). The sometimes fourth phase is end-of-life or dismantling and demolition or something similar. Let's hope your Maintenance/CMMS project does not include a fourth phase. Your project is now in the Operations and Maintenance phase. As far as how you intend to "operate your system", it is necessary to establish clear cut objectives and goals and make them well known so that neither you nor your staff will easily lose sight of the original objectives. The stated objectives of the maintenance department must be consistent with the mission of the maintenance department. If there is no mission statement for maintenance, you should establish one. It's vitally important that you and your supervisory chain agree as to what your mission is. Some rudimentary mission objectives could include:

Provide a quality of effective maintenance services that support facility operational requirements.
Reduce unscheduled equipment downtime through effective maintenance planning.
Utilize the CMMS report generator to provide meaningful management reports that will enhance control of maintenance.
Utilize CMMS to ensure that maintenance is performed efficiently through organized planning and coordinated use of material, manpower and time.
Create and maintain measurements of maintenance performance within CMMS.

CMMS, in fact all information management systems, have made some tremendous strides in the past year or two¡¦in fact, just in the past few months! They can do things that you never dreamed of asking for. That's not intended to be a put down but an honest to goodness fact that is meant to tell you that, in the future, the manager who is best equipped to make the right decisions in the shortest span of time is going to be the manager who has the most facts available to him. Because you have CMMS, you are going to be expected to have inordinate amounts of information immediately available to you and you are going to be expected to make quick and effective decisions and recommendations.

Your goals should support any objectives that you establish. The goals should be the measurable steps along the pathway toward meeting your objectives. One of your highest priorities should be keeping your equipment operating (reducing equipment downtime). The corresponding goal would be to reduce down time by xx%. Assuming that your CMMS package has provisions for entering and tracking downtime, you will just need to carefully log all downtime and enter the information in CMMS; total as well as specific equipment downtime can be retrieved and compared with last month's, last year's, or last week's. This is as close as you can get to a 'real time' measurement of your progress toward achieving your objective.

One of your first objectives should be to maximize maintenance program effectiveness by efficient performance of the maintenance program elements and measuring maintenance function effectiveness. How do you decide what is effective? Do not guess, look at the data! All the information you have is in the data. If you can establish objectives and quantify them then you can measure effectiveness. Specific areas for measurement should include percent of rework, percent of planned maintenance work, percent of unplanned maintenance work. Establish standards that will assign actual costs for equipment downtime and then track both planned and unplanned downtime.

Look at individual maintenance procedures and, where applicable, try to establish a gauge for measuring each one's contribution towards equipment reliability. For example, there is a good chance that all your electric motors do not have identical maintenance requirements. Whatever the reason is, you can use the differences to help determine the effectiveness of the maintenance. Different frequencies could be due to a typing error, or different manufacturer's recommendations, or different motor characteristics or just different people separately developing the maintenance requirements.

Perhaps one of your maintenance actions calls for measuring insulation resistance (IR) of motors, but you have no method to evaluate the IRs. Truth is, that without additional data, - - things like ambient and winding temperatures, polarization index, insulation system in use, etc., - - the IR values are of little use. The time spent to measure IR is completely wasted if there is not a thorough and structured system for evaluation; contribution toward reliability would be exactly zero. In the typical school and hospital environments, such a motor monitoring program is seldom warranted. Talk to your maintenance crew and to operating personnel about the equipment they maintain and operate and you may develop a consensus regarding some of the more obviously ineffective maintenance actions. Subscribe to and read maintenance periodicals. They often publish results of long term studies regarding maintenance practices that can be of great help in revising your approach to maintenance to a more effective program.

Use your own maintenance program as a basis for investigating failure causes. A chill water pump fails; it's defying your rule about no unscheduled downtime. Look at its history, . . .then look at some other similar pumps, - - similar in age, similar in usage, and similar in maintenance. Look for the differences. When you know what the differences are, look at each and determine if there is anything that could account for longer life (or shorter life). What is in their history that could account for these pumps being more dependable than the failed chill water pump; then look at the other side and ask what is in the chill water pump's history that could cause premature failure? Maybe it's a difference in lubricating schedules or in the lubricant itself. Maybe the chill water pump that failed just had its bearing's replaced four months earlier; now you could be looking at a training problem or a procedural fault. Could be that bearings are replaced using the old (but dependable?) hammer and block method. (Nobody ever realized that bearings replaced using this method never lasted more than four months).

Whether you identify the problem or not should not deter you from doing the same sort of investigation the next time you have an unscheduled outage due to failure. Document the data and your analysis every time you perform one. Believe me, it will pay off for you. As the maintenance manager, you must minimize ineffective maintenance and completely eliminate maintenance that could be the cause of early troubles or even failure.

A second objective should be to minimize the costs associated with your facility's maintenance program. This may not have anything directly to do with your CMMS, but your CMMS has all the data for doing it. The maintenance procedures used in your facility for lubrication should spell out the type of lubricant as a minimum. If the requirements were taken from manufacturer's literature, the procedure probably includes the lubricant manufacturer and lubricant grade and brand name. By pulling out all lubricant data and application requirements in CMMS, you can develop a lubricant equivalency matrix, which in turn can be used to minimize the number of different brands and grades needed and will probably reduce the total quantity you must keep on hand by close to 50%. You can also produce a single Lube Map which can take the place of several procedures, and which can be performed by a Lube Team in much less time and in fewer separate efforts. Consolidating lubrication requirements is an obvious cost saving practice. A thorough and detailed review of other CMMS consumable requirements can probably produce similar cost saving practices in other areas as well.

If it is not a part of the CMMS program (this thought is inconceivable), develop a maintenance history data sheet for entering maintenance and replacement/repair part data into your CMMS. The number one requirement for entering maintenance history is that it be entered by separate fields; as many separate fields as possible. When you are trying to pull data to analyze a failure, the availability of data from the following separately entered data fields:

Failed Bearing Manufacturer
Failed Bearing Lubricant (name)
Failed Bearing P.N.
Failed Bearing Lubricant appearance (descriptive)
Failed Bearing last replaced date
Failed Bearing Application (System Name/Number)
Failed Bearing last lubricated date
Failed Bearing Speed (RPM)
Etc.

can reduce data retrieval and analysis time by up to 90% from that required when retrieving from a narrative history. It is likely that your CMMS has some of these data fields, but very unlikely that it would contain as many as you and I would like to see. Question your vendor concerning the efficacy of user developed maintenance history data sheets.

Minimizing costs also has very much to do with labor. When CMMS is first implemented, the times shown on each maintenance requirement that are associated with performing maintenance are not expected to be accurate and should not be used to make adjustments to maintenance staff manning levels. Following about three months of using the CMMS, monthly and quarterly maintenance requirements are starting to repeat and should be more representative of the time required to prepare, perform and paperwork a Maintenance Requirement. Now is the time to begin to randomly observe your maintenance staff in action. Is there a bottle neck common to all maintenance teams? Is one Maintenance Team consistently getting bogged down in one particular area? It may be a good practice to rotate maintenance team supervisors every four to six months. This can prevent team members from acquiring bad habits; it can prevent team members from establishing good maintenance practices as well. Look thoroughly at the maintenance teams before you decide on a rotation.

It is vitally important to your maintenance program to have well thought out and publicized objectives. Once they are established, look at your CMMS to provide the information needed to set goals that are achievable steps toward meeting your objectives and to measuring the progress.

Mr. Klein is a Principal Engineer with Life Cycle Engineering, Inc. (LCE) where he has been involved with maintenance engineering and CMMS operation for more than eighteen years. LCE is a multi-disciplined, engineering firm with special expertise in maintenance engineering and condition monitoring technology.