LIFECYCLE ASSET MANAGEMENT SUCCESS IN THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY MEANS AN EAM SYSTEM THAT GUARANTEES OUTSTANDING PLANT AND EQUIPMENT RELIABILITY
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The most important question you need to ask, the one that makes all the difference is, “How do you create reliability?”
In April 2016 the world of enterprise asset management and operational excellence changed. Finally you could design and build a lifecycle asset management system that guaranteed the world class plant and equipment reliability needed for operational excellence success.
Here we stand, centuries after the industrial revolution, and our plant and equipment still fail.
The same problems in our machines and operating assets from two hundred years ago continue to haunt us — excessive vibration, loose fasteners, contaminated lubrication, deformed machinery and components, incorrectly installed parts, and all the rest.
Even after centuries of scientific, materials-of-construction, and industrial development so very few operations reach the pinnacle of operational success. There is something terribly wrong in the way we do enterprise asset management, operational excellence, and reliability.
I first spotted this phenomenon in 1999. After spending the previous ten years learning and applying conventional reliability, maintenance management, enterprise asset management and operational excellence knowledge and practices, my industrial operation still had lousy uptime and preventable failures.
On a fateful day in 1999 I said, “Enterprise Asset Management and Maintenance Management do not work! All I have been taught is wrong, because they cannot guarantee the results they are supposed to deliver.”
The only explanation for the poor outcomes from Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) that makes sense to me is the methodology used either contains the wrong things, or it is terribly incomplete.
You too need to question all that you think is right about how to get highly reliable machinery and equipment. It is a fantastically liberating experience: to think deeply about how to really create the world class asset reliability needed for operational excellence success.
An Enterprise Asset Management Model Needs to Be 100% Successful Every Time It Is Used
I’ve been the luckiest lifecycle asset management and reliability professional in the world.
In my career I designed machines, made their parts, assembled them together, repaired machines, installed them for use, operated them, brought machines for businesses, and set up business systems intended to maintained physical assets at high reliability. By 1999 I’d worked with every aspect of the plant and equipment life cycle and had done the associated engineering and business management. It gave me a unique perspective available only to a very few others on the planet.
As an engineer and a scientist, I need believable proof and evidence that what is told to me is true. This had to be the case with anything to do with enterprise asset management, operational excellence and reliability. What was known about them in the past could not be right because those models hardly ever worked for their Users.
Even the consultants and academics that promoted them could not make the models work successfully in companies. The EAM models were flawed.
Being now free of my past habitual thinking and false solutions, I could finally see why the asset management models failed. Most important of all, I understood how to build a far better way to world class plant reliability—one that brought sure success for everyone who used it.
I had been using enterprise asset management and maintenance management models that might work for 1 in 100 businesses. That was the hidden ‘con’ in the asset management and reliability models promoted by EAM consultants and academics—the concepts could work.
Their EAM models looked good, they sounded good, they covered what seemed necessary, they should work. Was this why everyone in industry believed what they were told by EAM consultants and academics—because the models should work?
But the historic reality was the EAM models did not work. At best maybe 1 in 100 operations transformed their reliability performance. What worth is a business model that cannot get 100% success for all businesses that use it?
I wanted a new answer; a sure solution; one that worked for 99% of companies and only might not work in 1% of operations.
It meant turning the whole world of enterprise asset management, operational excellence and reliability on its head. It meant inventing a new life-cycle asset management methodology for the 21st Century that was sure to get world class asset reliability for everyone who used it.
The Most Important Question In Life-cycle Asset Management, “How Do You Create Reliability?”
The most important question I asked myself in 1999, and maybe in my whole life, was, “How do you create reliability?” It was the right question, and it made all the difference, because it went to the heart of what makes a successful lifecycle asset management system.
Over the next few years I developed a new mantra that explained exactly how to create reliability: “first parts fail, then machines stop.” Once you have highly reliable parts you also get highly reliable machines and equipment.
In 2009 I put all the new concepts into my first book on getting lifecycle asset management success: Plant and Equipment Wellness – a process for exceptional plant and equipment reliability and maximum life cycle profits, published by Engineers Australia.
To create reliability you first need highly reliable components in your machinery and equipment. Then you need to keep them that way during installation, operation and maintenance.
My focus changed from wanting to do the maintenance of plant and equipment well, to designing and applying the right life cycle and business processes that made equipment parts outstandingly reliable for their entire service lifetime.
From this thinking the ‘component stress to business process’ asset management and reliability model shown in the inverted triangle image below was made available for the whole world to use.
I noticed many consultants and academics used triangles to explain their near-impossible-to-be-successful asset management models. The Plant Wellness Way EAM also uses a triangle, but it’s an inverted triangle; one that turns lifecycle asset management, operational excellence, and reliability-creation on their heads!
The inverted triangle was a perfect metaphor.
Starting with a critical component at the bottom apex, you identify the proper and correct practices for its outstanding reliability. The right solutions for each critical part sum together to become the parent equipment’s operating, maintenance and reliability strategy.
By 2016 I had finalized the full model, and developed all the necessary processes, techniques, and methods. I’d even coined a new name: Plant Wellness Way EAM. I put what I’d learnt into my second book, Industrial and Manufacturing Wellness, published by Industrial Press.
PWW EAM gets you to build the right processes into your business system. You embed world class reliability strategy and methods throughout you entire operation. In this way you ensure world class plant and equipment reliability is your natural operating outcome.
Like filling a glass with fresh, cool water, the inverted Plant Wellness Way EAM triangle fills your company up, from the bottom to the top, with only the right practices that cause machinery health and outstanding reliability. You design-in the operating asset health and wellness that makes your business a great success.
Plant Wellness Way EAM Builds You the Lifecycle Asset Management System You Need for the Twenty First Century
By first focusing on what causes outstanding machinery and equipment component reliability, you easily identify the necessary activities that need to be done to get long trouble-free parts’ lifetimes.
Those activities become your operational and maintenance procedures. The procedures contain your PWW EAM world class reliability strategy. Your strategy for outstanding reliability gets built into your business processes; those processes become your business system; and now you can get the plant and equipment reliability you need for sure operational excellence success.
The wonderful discovery was that you could design and build the ideal processes needed to create exceptional parts reliability. You could make those answers the standard operational practices done by everyone in your company. You can have a life cycle asset management system that delivers outstanding operating profits because your machines and plant never fail!
Why all the old models used by consultants and academics world-wide to tell us how to get asset management success hardly ever worked became clear. It’s because there was no connection between what their EAM model said to do, and the creation of totally certain equipment reliability.
When you use the traditional enterprise asset management and operational excellence business models you get very good at doing things that make little or no difference in reducing your operating equipment risks. Hence, you cannot get reliability success because your operating risks still remain in your assets!
The Plant Wellness Way ‘stress to process’ EAM model is a scientific solution that totally addressed the falsehoods believed to be true during the past two hundreds of years of industrial plant operation and machinery use.
The Plant Wellness Way EAM inverted triangle below represents your life cycle asset management system as built using Plant Wellness Way EAM.
I use the “Enterprise” Wellness Way profit distribution curves logo below to explain how the Plant Wellness Way EAM methodology makes businesses hugely successful, and fills their coffers to the highest levels. With Plant Wellness Way EAM you eliminate your risks so operating losses cannot happen. And you also focus on optimizing your asset productivity and performance.
Now, you know how to create world class reliability. You can have all the answers to solve all your industrial equipment reliability problems. You can create world class reliable assets when you use the Plant Wellness Way EAM. The one job that you have to do is to bring those new answers into your company so that it can become that good!
Phone or send an email to learn more about using the Plant Wellness Way EAM to get 21st Century life cycle asset management at your site. Our approved PWW EAM Consultants contact details are on the Contact Us webpage.