What can we learn from Japan?

It is a concept we started exploring eighteen months back. We started talking to senior maintenance managers on the state of activities and critical assets. Along the way, we realized that there is no formal organization for maintenance professionals and not much senior level support for them. So we formed this organization with some high-level objectives like giving a platform to each other, sharing experiences, peer talk, knowledge exchange etc. Asset Reliability and Maintenance Management essentially benefits companies by increasing productivity, increasing asset life, reducing costs and equipment purchases, etc. Effective ARMM solutions are necessary for asset-intensive enterprise to realize their business goals. 

 

About 50 per cent companies in India don't have or don't use a maintenance work planning system- CMMS System. Of those who have a work planning system, only around 1/3 i.e. 33 per cent companies track their manpower requirement. Around 50 per cent companies who have turnover more than Rs. 200 Crore don't do Failure Analysis on their breakdowns. Around 50 per cent companies in India don’t adhere to more than 75 per cent of their preventive maintenance plans. 

So how serious is the scenario for India? With reference to disasters?

In Western India, around 2000 companies are above Rs. 200 Crore turn over which employ around 80,000 to 1 Lakh people in maintenance. All India, this figure could be around three Lakh. This is an indication of a much larger systemic problem that C-level leadership is turning a blind eye to the importance of plant machinery safety, reliability & maintenance. The consequences of events like Fukushima, Chernobyl or Union Carbide that may happen once in a while, impose a terrible impact on the human lives and economy on a large scale. Catastrophic incidents should not be the drivers to change the lax attitude of management towards safety, reliability & maintenance management. 

Was the BP Oil Rig fiasco a classic maintenance oversight?

Foreign companies have the strongest safety measurements. Some times few things are not documented, some fall through cracks, sometimes some people who are supposed to do it, fail. Could the big leak be avoided 100 per cent? No. But attention to maintenance, quality of safety records, and enough visibility to that particular occasion is definitely what we should look at. That is one challenge everywhere. Maintenance records are not kept well. The top management does not often know what’s happening or what happened. Even a one-off oversight can be catastrophic as we saw.

Does maintenance still trail a Black box approach? Or has it started getting proactive?

We give a lot of importance to activities related to maintenance and environment safety as the focus area, more so from a bottom line view of a company. Downtime of any equipment can be really costly. Improved labour utilization, and equipment utilization is rising across different industries. But overall the life of equipment needs attention.

And that’s not happening?

Generally senior executives are not seen taking lead and there is lack of best-practice adoption. There are no computerized maintenance systems. When you have a large number of people at work, you should ensure that standard operating procedures are adhered to. Visibility and control can not be taken for granted. In West, this effort itself is automated as per a machine’s need of maintenance and risk of failure. That’s what you call predictive maintenance.

Very interesting and true. But there are two aspects here. Certain machinery classes need a lot of sophistication, because of the way they are and the complexity with which they operate. Human error can be catastrophic so a lot of alarms and checks need to be in place. Yes, humans have a lot to do with such costly errors but proper training can be helpful.

Also, how disruptive can the whole exercise of maintenance alone be for overall operations?

Yes, that’s an important factor. At companies running on a 24/7 clock or on an assembly line model, by design, they usually have redundancies. Some problems can be solved. An actual turbine never stops in a power plant. So sometimes maintenance happens while machines are running and sometimes in a little disruptive fashion.

You have mentioned senior management’s lack of attention to this vital aspect. What can CIOs read in here?

There has to be a concerted effort to maintenance needs. Tracking critical assets, automation, documentation, recording standard operating procedures, all these are important. A lot of data related to plant and machinery is being created, so this has to be leveraged properly for informed decision-making. Some data centres are huge, but they don’t follow maintenance related to-dos, and that is more expensive.