In 2023, despite a recovering economy, a sense of unease prevails. Trust in economic foundations, justice, and public health has eroded with supply chain disruptions, geopolitical tensions, inflation, and technological advancements like AI. This loss of trust fuels fundamental #uncertainty where there's no scientific basis for making calculated predictions. This uncertainty disrupts rational decision-making, rendering traditional approaches ineffective. In such circ*mstances, what comes as essential is resilience – the ability to respond and adapt adeptly.
As all other industrial activities, maintenance will need to rethink the long-time developed strategies based on a more stable world, where you knew the probabilities and the risks. In an optimized system, all its parts need to work properly, and some of them are going to be operating at their limit. If things go wrong, even minor disruptions can set off a cascade of failures. With efficiency comes more brittle operations when now many times you are just trying to get through a situation and be ready for the next thing to come up.
The European Standard EN 13306 has long been a cornerstone in guiding maintenance practices, providing a framework for classifying and managing maintenance activities. A later addition to this standard, known as "Opportunistic Maintenance" has brought a new dimension to maintenance strategies focusing on seizing opportunities for maintenance actions that arise during other activities, such as production shutdowns, modifications, routine inspections, or supply chain disruptions.
Catching these chances is within the expertise of the Maintenance Manager, although we can usually observe very simple and informal lists of deferred maintenance tasks in the event of an unforeseen malfunction.
An organized methodology for #opportunisticmaintenance will challenge the core principles of traditional long-term maintenance strategies, yet it will equip decision makers with an improved tool for addressing novel challenges.
However, this new paradigm brings many obstacles to overcome:
Cost Efficiency
Opportunistic Maintenance stands out as the most cost-effective among all available maintenance approaches. It brings a valuable advantage: additional time for execution. This extra time dedicated to repairing or inspecting equipment significantly improves the quality of outcomes while utilizing fewer resources. Moreover, there are no expenses incurred from stopping operations solely for the sake of maintenance.
Immediate attention can be addressed to emerging issues, preventing minor problems from escalating into major breakdowns. This translates into improved equipment reliability and extends operational life.
What is evident is that in numerous scenarios, challenges arise from stakeholders besides Maintenance who insist on minimizing expenses across all areas during a production halt. By pre-emptively simulating scenarios such as layoffs or other disruptive events throughout the entire organization, we can establish the limits for expenditures and resource allocation needed for maintenance.
Adaptive Planning and KPI’s
The Annual Shutdown involves the dedicated #maintenanceteams investing significant time and energy into identifying requirements, listing preventive tasks, and arranging upcoming activities well in advance. Consequently, services and spare parts have been procured. Ongoing discussions indicate that there are no major issues with the scheduled plan.
Suddenly, one month earlier, due to external market issues, the plant must halt its operations for several days, due to production supply chain disruptions.The Head of Maintenance is call urgently to a meeting with the executive board. In this meeting, he anticipates a question that is obvious, yet anxiety-inducing: Could we initiate the general shutdown right away?
Despite putting in an immense effort to meticulously reorganize the anticipation of the shutdown the harsh reality remains that the results will not be the same. Important tasks will inevitably be postponed due to services that cannot be reschedule.Some necessary spare parts have yet to arrive. Shutdown planned costs are increasing daily to overcome constrains. Consequently, a sense of #discouragement is starting to take root within the Maintenance teams, as they are consistent of the negative impact both in the reliability of the assets and in the budget.
The systematically organized and carefully planned yearly activity, which was formerly a well-coordinated process, undergoes an abrupt shift into a swift decision-making process.
If you're familiar with situations like this one in the past, the significant concern is that they will become more commonplace in the times ahead.
Have The existing Key Performance Indicators (#kpi) have been established to account for increasing events like this? The answer is: No. They were design to promote a continuous improvement under stable condition, not for uncertainty scenarios. Thus, it is necessary that the new maintenance indicators can measure the ability to respond and adapt to fast changing environments, where the maintenance organization has little control over.
Budgeting
I have been a strong supporter of variable maintenance budgets, set by the output of operations or the production transformation costs. In a circular cycle, if Maintenance is able to enhance equipment availability, it leads to increased production, the EBIT will be higher and ultimately Maintenance will have extra means to reinvest in the reliability of the assets.
In the volatile markets, Maintenance will benefit from multi-year fixed budget that can be utilized during favorable circ*mstances while also aligning with the efforts of all involved parties.
Data Insights
The available CMMS choices in the market are clearly designed with the base of continuous improvement and excellence operations in mind. However, they possess limited functionalities when it comes to aiding the comprehension of how executing the same task across various timeframes can yield varying outcomes. To address this, developments are necessary to improve the task flexibility, diverse scenarios simulation, testing expenses, measure the impact on reliability, and more. This is where I strongly believe that AI will bring innovative solutions for analyzing complex data involving numerous factors, thereby enriching the decision-making process.
Conclusion
In Spencer Johnson's book "Who Moved My Cheese," the characters faced a situation where their familiar cheese was moved, forcing them to adapt to change. Similarly, the concept of Opportunistic Maintenance presents a promising way to mitigate the effects of current uncertain markets. Just as the characters had to choose between waiting and adapting, maintenance organizations in industries have typically been conservative and careful. Some may adopt a wait-and-see attitude, while others will proactively establish new standards, leading to a reform in their strategic approach to maintenance.
At the end it is all about #opportunity.
