Operational Excellence Processes and Practices and Plant Wellness Way EAM System-of-Reliability

What is Operational Excellence?

There are critically important business and operational processes and practices you need to have in-place which guarantee utmost equipment uptime and ensure the highest operating profit from physical assets. It requires embedding the right knowledge and disciplines business-wide; creating error-free and reliable supply chains, and using a whole-of-life asset management system which surely gets continuous world class reliability and productivity from operating assets.

Once you focus enterprise asset management strategy and methods and operations management practices on defect removal and failure elimination in every phase of your plant and equipment life-cycle, you intentionally make your business processes and operating assets more and more reliable in ways that turn organizations into world-class operations.

Operational Excellence is the name given for that level of outstanding business and production performance.

Your company needs to learn how to build the business processes and practices that get lowest operating costs and highest productivity from your plant and equipment. You will need to build a life cycle asset management system that:

1. makes plant and equipment run consistently at highest availability,
2. produces at full capacity with 100% first-pass-quality,
3. delivers the most operating profit and ensures you will get it,
4. reduces production costs and wastes,
5. gets utmost throughput from existing production plant, and
6. ensures high productivity is inevitable.

It is vital that you focus clearly on doing those activities that really create a world class enterprise asset management system and that drive world class plant and equipment performance. Understanding how you intentionally make your business processes and production equipment more and more reliable turns average organizations into world-class organizations.

You need to find out how to deliver lower production costs and higher profit margins by:

• controlling the inherent variability in both business and operating processes to within designated limits,
• managing risk by reducing the likelihood of adverse incidents, along with minimizing their consequences,
• using failure preventing quality standards throughout your plant and equipment lifetime, including capital equipment acquisition and installation,
• stopping human error by ensuring the accuracy and precision of human activity and intervention, and
• minimizing total life cycle costs with proactive spreadsheet modelling of what robs your operating profit.

Your Operational Excellence solution will need to encompass key elements of systems engineering, reliability engineering, maintenance management, operational management, risk management, industrial engineering and be soundly guided by sound financial management practices. The three areas to focus on that surely improve production plant and equipment performance are:

1. Equipment Reliability: The fundamentals and understandings of what drives machine reliability. You must include the critical concepts that get the most out of your operating plant’s performance. Important issues, such as maximizing series process reliability, reducing operating risk with chance reduction strategies and not only focusing on consequence reduction strategies, grasping the implications of the ‘Physics of Failure’ when considering parts replacement and equipment purchases, and when to proactively apply reliability engineering on your equipment.
2. Parts Level Maintenance Strategy:/ Knowledge on the quality standards, component risk strategies and right methods to use to sustain high reliability of your operating equipment is vital. You need to apply a proactive, life cycle operational risk management model in your business. You want to build holistic, business system-wide maintenance plans containing the fewest actions, the simplest equipment monitoring and the most powerful continual improvement strategies necessary to create the safe, sure, high reliability, low maintenance costs and full production you want. (This holistic, business-wide plan is perhaps the most important document that you will create in the life of your operation.)
3. Asset Life-Cycle Management: Core factors critical to successfully build and run operations for high reliability and availability must be built into your company DNA. Including the best way to maximize life cycle profits, identifying and using the systems and practices that produce most benefit for your operation, and powerful ways to involve and motivate your workforce to produce great results. You want to combine the best reliability and maintenance knowledge into a lifetime strategy for your plant and equipment that moves your business toward top-class performance and keeps it there. You want to create Operational Excellence.

You want to know exactly how to ensure that your machines last longer, that production quality is maintained and that delivery schedules are surely met. In short, you want to know how to get Operational Excellence.

Operational Excellence requires the best enterprise asset management and maintenance management processes that prevent equipment failure. Design your business systems and business processes to produce the right reliability and operational outcomes. Use the right principles and the proper practices of successful operational asset maintenance and reliability so that you bring best practice life cycle asset and maintenance management solutions into your organization. Do that and you will naturally deliver healthy plant and equipment forevermore—you will become an Operational Excellence company too.

To get to Operational Excellence performance fast your company needs the correct guidance to build the most effective financial, operational and maintenance processes. Get our advice with a quick phone call to our office, or send an email to me. Be sure you start down the right path to world class operational performance and then stay on it.