Obtaining the maximum operating efficiency from your company’s equipment is similar to taking a team of athletes’ performance to the next level. But what happens when some of your athletes have been running since the early part of the last century? PSN (Production Services Network)’s West Coast team has developed an evergreen preventative maintenance program that combines technical innovation with personalized care to produce results that outperform the majority of newer and more technologically advanced equipment at similar plants.

As you might expect, the program includes identifying and eliminating failures, precision

Savings from the reduction in preventative maintenance changes reached $1.4 million this year.
maintenance and measuring component wear. The program also looks at the materials the machines are made of and evaluates which components can be improved. However, the deep-level change essential to support the technical changes has involved a comprehensive review of procedures and how the organization manages people.

The facility is approximately 75 sq miles (194 sq km) and comprises four gas processing plants, cogeneration facilities and more than 100 gas compressors. Gas compressors are some of the largest and most costly pieces of equipment in the industry, and their availability is essential to moving gas through the various stages of processing in order to make more product to sell. This means that uptime and availability are significant contributors to the bottom line.

Improving compressor availability by improving the preventative maintenance program is one of the areas that the service company continuously focuses on for its customers. An evergreen process means continually improving equipment reliability, and when you operate and maintain equipment, this is the only way to remain competitive. However, continual improvement means working within continual change, and this takes commitment from every employee, particularly to maintain safety and quality standards.

The tortoise and the hare
There is a perception that doing maintenance tasks as quickly as possible speeds the return of equipment to operational status and so increases uptime. However, often this just encourages people to take short cuts, which can lead to mistakes and increased downtime and cost to fix. The service provider advocates the exact opposite and has developed a number of tools to ensure its personnel do things right the first time.

Taking time to save time
Each month the planners, reliability data analysts and craft heads determine what personnel, time and materials are needed to complete the repairs to increase availability and reduce downtime. Following on from this, the full team holds a look-ahead meeting, which brings all involved personnel together to develop the preventative maintenance schedule for the next 2 months. Industry standards show that following this process will reduce downtime and cost of repairs by four to seven times.

The pre-preventative maintenance review meetings are held with the crew that is going to perform the work. This gives everyone involved the opportunity to discuss what they need to do the job right. The discussions reduce the perception that the company is rushing, demonstrate to personnel that the company cares about what is happening and help supervisors and managers keep in touch with the details of what their teams need to
do a better job.

Post-job meetings are held with the crew that performed the work. We discuss what worked well and what should be changed to continue improvement and set future intervals for maintenance.

Taking the devil out of the detail
The service company has developed time lines for each compressor showing every time the
The team-managed program resulted in consistently higher uptime for compressors.
unit goes down and the reason for being out of service. The reasons are separated and color-coded by function so various departments can work to improve their area of responsibility. Recurring failures are evaluated and eliminated using root cause failure analysis.

Job step sheets have been developed to break the job into phases: disassembly, inspection, cleaning and reassembly. By separating each phase, personnel slow down and think about each phase and execute every step just as it would be done in the factory.

Task sheets contain written instruction for completing every task on the job to ensure that it is in line with the original equipment manufacturer specifications. They also require the craft person that performed the task to sign off. These sheets improve precision maintenance by ensuring all employees perform the task in the same way, which makes it easier to eliminate failures, and they also underline ownership for the job.

Hands-on approach to torque
Torque procedures are followed for all components during reassembly. This is vital for proper installation to eliminate component failure. The old perception was that using impact guns aided in reducing repair time; however, component failures increased due to improper torque. We have eliminated the use of impact guns for assembly on all jobs: every bolt is torqued by hand, using proper torque methods. Without rushing the job, feedback from our craft personnel is that the job is actually faster, easier and more precise when they follow the process, and it eliminates re-work.

Tough inspections
Onsite job inspections are critical to the success of any program. While meetings demonstrate the importance the service company managers attach to knowing about what craft personnel are doing and caring about how they are working, it is also essential to make sure that procedures are followed. For this reason, project leaders go out to the site for inspections so that they can both ask tough questions and make sure that appropriate resources are made available.

Innovation
The company measures component wear rates in order to determine and change preventative maintenance frequencies. The team’s formal process to measure wear has also enabled team members to work with vendors to make material changes and design modifications based on each facility’s specific requirements. These innovations are only possible because of the time taken to get to know what works best for the machines and through sticking to rigorous procedures to clearly identify precise areas for improvement. This detailed monitoring also means that the company only changes equipment frequencies based on verifiable data.

A happy ever after
Investing time and personnel in order to save time and costs is not a new idea; what is outstanding about this project is the results that have been achieved.

Empowerment of craft personnel is continuing to help drive improvements. Through the steps above, the company has changed “the way things are done around here,” and the most important step was to engage all parties involved. This helps reduce frustration and eliminate old paradigms.

The technical procedures to measure component wear and eliminate failure have enabled the team to reduce the number of annual gas compressor preventative maintenance programs by 99 for 2006.

This resulted in annual savings to the customer in excess of US $1.4 million. Compressor run time and availability continue to improve, while time spent on maintenance has been reduced. Three years ago, 32 compressors had 90% or better availability, in 2006, 53 units had 90% or better availability, and 35 of those were above 95%. Although overall availability for gas compressors is exceptionally high, there is still a steady increase of availability.

The team’s approach to improvements is holistic and ongoing. Members continue to test new materials and processes to improve the reliability, availability and runtime of equipment while reducing maintenance cost and increasing delivered product.

Innovation, enabled by care and attention, continues to drive the company to meet new standards at the California facility.