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Mike Sondalini: Enterprise Asset Management Best-Practices Powered by Lifetime Reliability Solutions. |
| B Eng (Hons), MBA, CP Eng. In an engineering and management career spanning 25 years he has held project engineering and maintenance management positions at the Swan Brewery and at Coogee Chemicals, a national Australian industrial and mining chemical manufacturer. He is also a qualified mechanical tradesman. Along with authoring numerous maintenance and industrial asset management publications sold on the Internet, he developed the www.feedforward.com.au UPTIME training series for chemical and process plant operators and maintainers. His consultancy 'Lifetime Reliability Solutions' (www.lifetime-reliability.com) specialises in identifying manufacturing and production wastes and losses and solving them using proprietary optimization solutions known as ‘ACE’ (Accuracy Controlled Enterprise), 'DOCTOR' (Design Options and Costs Total Optimization Review) and ‘DAFT Costing’ (Defect and Failure True Costing). He is a past Chairman of the WA Chapter of the Maintenance Engineering Society of Australia. Mike is based in Perth, Western Australia. You can contact Mike by email, phone or fax using the details on his website contact page http://www.lifetime-reliability.com/howtocontact.html. |
| Why You Must Never Let Equipment Fail! |
Why You Must Never Let Equipment Fail! In my first article I mentioned that “maintenance is cheap, it’s repairs that are expensive.” In this article you will see how incredibly disastrous and terribly expensive it is to have equipment failures. You will see that they totally destroy the profit from your business. I will also give you a hint on how to make ridiculously huge profits, slash your workforce to the lowest level you need and make your products so cheaply that you will give the Japanese and Chinese a real ‘run for their money’! First I must thank Don Fitchett from Industrial Business Network www.DowntimeCentral.com for introducing me to the concept of ‘True Downtime Costing’ (TDC) and its power in finding the hidden losses in manufacturing downtime incidents. DAFT Costing takes the TDC concept to any situation involving defect, error or failure. In the chemical industry we are not surprised by failing equipment. Our machinery and plant work in extreme environments with aggressive chemicals. You have to expect failures from equipment in those sorts of services and duties. If you accept that as ‘a truth’ then I will hazard a guess that your business is struggling and not making much money. I also bet that you have a lot of ‘fire-fighting’ going on all the time. Maybe I’m wrong, I hope that in your case I am, but my experience is that it’s the way that you think that gets you in trouble. With this article I want to see if I can change your thinking into the sort of thinking that will make you serious money in the chemical game. Let’s have a failure … and see what it truly costs you to fix it. For simplicity we will have a centrifugal pump failure. They are a common pump in the chemical game and most people know them well. In this pump the inboard shaft bearing has collapsed. A common enough failure and one that most of use would not be greatly bothered by, we would just go and get it fixed. This bearing is on a 3 inch (76 mm) shaft. It is a tapered roller bearing straight-off the shelf. Let’s start adding up the cost of this failure in the table below. We will assume the wages employees are an average cost to the company of $40 per hour and the more senior people are an average of $60 per hour. The product costs $0.50 a liter to make and sells for $0.75 per liter. Throughput is 10,000 liters per hour. Electricity costs $0.10 per kW.Hr. All product than can be made can be sold. Action No. Description Time minutes Labour Cost Materials Cost 1 First the pump stops and there is no product flow. 2 The process stops. 3 The control room sends an operator to look. 10 7 4 Operator looks over the pump and reports back. 10 7 5 Control room contacts Maintenance. 5 3 6 Maintenance sends out a craftsman. 15 10 7 Craftsman diagnoses problem and tells control room. 10 7 8 Control room decides what to do. 10 7 9 Control room raises a work order for repair. 5 3 10 Maintenance leader or Planner looks the job over and authorizes the work order. 30 20 11 Maintenance leader or Planner writes out parts needed on a stores request. 15 10 12 Storeman gathers spares parts together and puts them in pick-up area. (Bearings, gaskets, 20 13 350 13 Maintenance leader delegates two men for the repair. 5 3 14 Maintenance leader or Planner organizes a crane and crane driver to remove the pump. 5 3 15 Repair men pick up the parts from store and return to the workshop. 10 20 16 Repair men go to job site. 15 20 17 Pump is electrically isolated and danger tagged out. 15 40 18 Pump is physically isolated from the process and tagged. 30 40 19 Operators drain-out the process fluid safely and wash down the pump. 30 120 20 Repair men remove drive coupling, backing plate, unbolt bearing housing, prepare pump for removal of bearing housing. 90 20 21 Crane lifts bearing housing onto a truck. 15 7 22 Truck drives to the workshop. 5 7 13 Bearing housing moved to work bench. 5 27 24 Shaft seal is removed in good condition. 20 120 25 Bearing housing stripped. 90 160 26 New bearings installed and shaft fitted back into housing. 120 27 28 Mechanical seal put back on shaft. 20 13 29 Backing plate and bearing housing put back on truck. 10 7 30 Truck goes to back to job site. 5 27 31 Crane and crane driver lift housing back into place. 20 80 32 Repairmen reassemble pump and position the mechanical seal. 60 80 33 Laser align pump. 60 80 34 Isolation tags removed. 10 20 35 Electrical isolation removed. 15 20 36 Process liquid reintroduced into pump. 30 20 37 Pump operation tested by operators. 15 10 38 Pump put back on-line by Control Room. 5 3 TOTAL 755 $970 $350 Action No. Description
You will be introduced to a concept I call ‘Defect and Failure True Costs’ or DAFT Costs for short. Daft means stupid, and you will soon see why letting equipment fail is really a very stupid thing to do.
To do the whole job took 12.6 hours at an apparent repair cost of $1300. The downtime was clearly a disaster but the repair cost was not too bad. Another fire successfully put out! But wait … we haven’t finished adding up all the costs yet! There are still more costs to be accounted for.