Maintworld 2/2020

EDITORIAL
This Summer
will be Different
THIS SUMMER WILL BE DIFFERENT for most of us,
and for maintenance people too. COVID-19 has
brought havoc to industry, markets and societies
around the world. There are winners as well as
losers. We remember well the last global economic
downturn in 2008. We remember manufacturers
cutting their maintenance budgets, and we remember
how these manufacturers struggled to cope
with demand after production volumes got back to
normal levels, or even higher after that economic
episode. Lessons learned? Cutting the maintenance
budget is just borrowing money from the
future. It works fine for now, next month or even a
few years, but after some time, underinvested assets will take their tax: bad OEE, increasing
failure rates, more serious failures and even accidents. Business continuity
is a continuous and never-ending process with several stages:
In this pandemic year, the industrial producers had to go through the phase of
reaction at the beginning of the crisis. To react means to take immediate actions
and measures to avoid harm. It was very important to realize that the thing has
really come, and we must fight – react. Look back and think: when exactly did you
realize that COVID-19 is here? And impacts your business? Was it early or late?
This delay may result in overreacting with panic and hysteria - as we observed.
The immediate response was followed by the fight to survive. For many, this
was solely about cash-flow. Producers were, or still are, struck by quarantine measures
resulting in limited (human) resources and loss of production capacity. The
suppliers were not able to deliver materials for production. And the demand from
end customers for certain products plummeted. This was a deadly cocktail for many
companies.
To survive we must adapt. By this I mean specifically taking advantage of the
situation. The production slowdown, or stoppage, was a unique opportunity to do
what was never done properly: shutdowns and turnarounds in full scope, neglected
preventive maintenance, deferred investments, cleaning, optimizing preventive
and predictive maintenance etc. Obviously, for these you need some money,
reserves to spend in hard times. Companies that have not created enough reserves
during the good times are now losing on this opportunity. There will be no “back
to normal” in this game. Too many things have changed. Therefore, in the recovery
stage, we will have to rethink and reengineer our former processes and strategies,
including business objectives and resulting maintenance strategies.
But the essential phase of the business continuity cycle is the phase of preparation
when we prepare for the next downturn, crisis or disaster. And we can be
sure that bad things will happen again. The preparation stage is the time for risk
management: identification of risks, evaluation of their impacts and probabilities
and mitigating. And creating financial reserves to spend in the next period of hard
times. Take advantage of the opportunity and use the reserves you made previously
to do all shutdown maintenance, revamps, preventive maintenance, asset register
clean-up, process and technologies optimizations as well as optimizations of
predictive maintenance techniques that were heavily implemented in recent years
but their efficiency was never really evaluated. Cutting your maintenance budgets
means introducing new risks into your operations.
6 maintworld 2/2020
Tomáš Hladík
Principal Consultant
Logio
Prague
52
The
Coronavirus crisis
requires a cost-centered
asset management
strategy. For many plant
operators, this will be a
shift of their strategy by
180 degrees.