Managing operational expenditure is a challenge for any asset, but as the age of an asset increases, additional challenges are introduced, and the cost of operational expenditure typically rises. These additional costs are usually driven by equipment failure, obsolescence, and lack of sufficient maintenance.

To help manage the costs of aging assets, maintenance and operational stakeholders need to consider, and invest into proven initiatives that optimise ways of working, increase equipment reliability and assure safety integrity of the facility.

The biggest enemy of maintenance and reliability is unplanned downtime. While planned downtime is inevitable when managing a plant, unplanned downtime is often one of the largest challenges and expenses.

When production has to cease unexpectedly because of a broken part or safety issue, time needs to be urgently spent to identify the problem, fix it, and ensure there are no ancillary issues before restarting. This is highly disruptive and costly, and maintenance teams are therefore always striving to avoid unexpected failures or breakdowns. 

A computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) is a critical element to efficient maintenance management. It is used to help meet production demands, reduce OPEX costs, increase profits, and minimize risk of incidents. In particular, an effective CMMS can provide better management and control of: 

Continual review of your maintenance program and process is a vital practice for maintenance teams - enabling them to optimize expenditure, unlock efficiencies and enhance safety.  At Add Energy we help companies do this through our benchmarking projects, which set our clients on a path to maintenance excellence, based on industry best practice and our experience of analysing over 1,000 assets worldwide.

To help companies efficiently monitor, track and analyse assets; Add Energy, the University of Salford and Innovate UK collaborated on a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) to develop an integrated solution using RFID hardware and IoT technologies. AssetVoice™ captures and manages any changes of components, throughout their lifecycle and in real time by utilising RFID tags, sensor technologies and cloud computing to automate the change management process in a simple, user-friendly, and fully customisable manner. 

After 15 years of working with companies to help build asset registers and develop maintenance management programs, our team has identified a trend of inaccurate and missing asset register data, which can cause significant issues for an operating facility. Without good quality and fully populated base data, assets run the risk of: 

• Equipment failing due to no maintenance being assigned or executed 
• Spare parts being unavailable due to no visibility on what is required 
• No assurance that the integrity of the equipment is being managed, which could result in an incident

Add Energy’s Maintenance Engineer, Trent Cooper, has witnessed this issue first-hand. In this blog post, he outlines the importance of plugging data gaps in your asset register, the challenges associated with traditional data collection methods, as well as a new digital way to streamline data collection and verification from source. 

Routing maintenance is a beneficial practice for maintenance teams, allowing them to maximize efficiency, productivity and safety by grouping smaller jobs together.  

The role of materials specialists can be challenging, especially when trying to strike the perfect balance between not only ensuring you have the inventory required to keep operations running smoothly, but also that costs and processes are continually being optimized.

Iain Wood, Add Energy’s Materials Manager, has shared the biggest challenges he has identified during his 35 years of working in the materials space, and provides actionable advice for overcoming or mitigating against them...