IMPLEMENTATIONby Bill HughesAsset Care subject matter expert — CCI-GrowthconWGLL Journal Volume 2 © CCI info@etracc.net www.etracc.net
MAINTAIN IT!Fast <strong>TRACC</strong> RCM is a more efficient and resource-friendly way todevelop reliability-based maintenance schedules.ImplementationThere have been many maintenance changes over the years because of a huge increasein the number and variety of physical assets (plant, equipment and buildings) to bemaintained throughout the world, increasingly complex designs, new techniques andevolving views on maintenance organisation and responsibilities.Maintenance is also responding to changing expectations. These include a growingawareness of both the extent to which equipment failure affects safety and theenvironment, and the connection between maintenance and product quality, plusincreasing pressure to achieve high plant availability and contain costs. Thus, maintenancepeople have to adopt new ways of thinking and acting, both as engineers and managers.SABMiller subsidiary, Grupo Cervecería Nacional de Panamá (Cervecería Nacional) inPanama City, is no exception to modern maintenance demands. The brewery wasintroduced to Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) several years ago by an externalconsulting company promoting aerospace-type RCM methodology, including inputfrom a US-based brewery. Sadly, attempts to translate into practice what had been learntfrom these sources met with little success.CCI was approached to provide an innovative fast track solution on 12 critical packagingmachines using minimum resources. The brief from SABMiller vice president manufacturing,Duncan Crow, was succinct, “We’re not in this to spend our lives analysing. We need toensure throughput and generate results rapidly. You should ensure that the length andbreadth of analysis is appropriate and that my team has confidence in what they’re doing.”To meet the required time scales, RCM analysis templates were sourced from CCI andSABMiller in Africa and used in combination with digital photographs of the actualmachine. These served as a vehicle for communicating failure modes, assessing currentcondition and a comparison base for implementing 5S on the actual machine.It’s a well-known notion in maintenance circles worldwide that RCM provides the userwith the most cost-effective way of realising equipment reliability. Unfortunately, mosttraditional RCM implementations in the past have resulted in long front-end analysistimes and large group analysis activity, which in most cases consigned RCM to just anotherfailed intervention.Thus, dispensing with the traditional RCM implementation approach of large groupanalysis activities, a flexible style was adopted in which only one specialist was withdrawnfrom the business at any one time. An action-learning approach was adopted duringanalysis of the first non-performing machine to ensure effective skills transfer to the teamand related specialists. Regular feedback sessions were held with the management team toexplain each step and its role in the asset care journey.Using the launch phase digital photographs coupled with the template approach, itbecame apparent that facilitation of the analysis sessions was made easy and front endanalysis time was reduced. On the palletiser, identified as the number one problemmachine, the entire analysis was completed within six working days, of which 10% wasviewed as once-off training time.In addition to the reliability-based maintenance programme developed for the machine,the specific focus was on using the existing high in-house predictive maintenancecapability and further realising the equipment operator’s potential of delivering acost-effective maintenance programme. During the analysis phase on the machine,other improvement opportunities were identified. Some, such as introducing a standardthree-tier root cause analysis system extending the 5S programme onto the machine andwork order management improvement procedures, already have commenced.Following completion of the first machine, Cerveceria Nacional’s facilitator team notedthe following, “Compared to the aerospace process introduced previously, Fast <strong>TRACC</strong> RCMis a more efficient and resource-friendly way to develop reliability-based maintenanceschedules. Furthermore, by concentrating on the actual failure mechanisms, we can identifyall problems causing poor machine performance.”WGLL Journal Volume 2 © CCI info@etracc.net www.etracc.net
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