The maintenance business process often starts with a request for work by a production operator, often as a first response to an equipment failure and/or a produc- tion stoppage. SAP provides the “Notification” (see Figure 1), an electronic document that notifies the Maintenance organization of the failure, and then goes on to record the activities and findings of the worker who services and rectifies the failure. Being equipped with the findings makes the document a good method for feeding back to the requester the status of the failed equipment, the damage found, and the cause of the failure.
So the journey to maintenance activity data collection commences with the “Notification” in SAP (See Figures 1 and 2), which provides the vehicle for the gathering of
the vital and searchable data. The following data entries are made by the originator of the Notification:
• The symptom of the problem
• The equipment on which the symptom appears to be occurring
• The time and date of the failure symptom • The identity of the reporter
• The apparent severity of the failure effect: – Critical to Health, Safety, and Environment – Critical to Production continuance
– Not severe – this work can be scheduled Once the technician has completed the repair, the following data is added to the Notification to provide feedback to the originator, and also to provide valuable, searchable, and coded (for ease of retrieval) failure his- tory data for Reliability Engineers:
• The object type of the equipment repaired (e.g., Slurry Pump, Mechanical Seal).
• The nature of the damage found (from a table of possible entries specific to the object type (e.g., water damage, dirt ingression, overheated).
• The estimated root cause of the failure condition. Here we recommend training in RCFA techniques such as the “Five Why’s”, to determine the root cause informally, but methodically (e.g., design defect, inadequate preventive maintenance, poor operating practices).
• The date and time of the failure of the equipment (could be SCADA data).
• The date and time of the return to service of the equipment (could be SCADA data).
Hence, in summary, the Notification alone provides: • To the serviceman responding to the call for help: A
complete picture of the problem as encountered by production.
• To the originator: After work execution, a complete picture of:
– that repair work that was executed and completed – the findings, and what the cause of the failure is
likely to be.
It is within this process
that the opportunities for
Reliability Engineering
data collection arise.
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• To the reliability Engineer:– The object type serviced – The damage type – The cause type
– The start and end of the malfunction (which may come directly from the SCADA) – from which mean time to repair can be computed (MTTR), and mean time between failures (MTBF) – The equipment outage time
(which may come directly from the SCADA) and there- fore the production, losses incurred
– The failure rate of this particu- lar equipment (and this type of equipment)
– The damage nature spectrum of this particular equipment (and this type of equipment) – The damage cause spectrum of
this particular equipment (and this type of equipment)
Figures 1 and 2 show where most of this data is located on the Noti- fication.
In addition to the data recorded in the Notification (which focuses on the failure itself), the second document in the SAP PM suite is aimed at the recording of detailed maintenance activity data, namely the maintenance Work Order. The Work Order has the capacity to record in detail each activity undertaken on the target equip- ment, such as who performed the
work, for how long, using what tools, procedures, exter- nal services, parts and materials, including documents, permits, and work clearances used.
So from the work order, we can learn the costs of maintenance, since one of the roles of a work order is to be a cost collector. The work order collects the costs of the labor time expended on maintenance and surveil- lance by internal resources, the costs of vendor supplied resources, the costs of materials consumption (in terms of spare parts), and consumables, whether drawn from an internal warehouse or procured.
The work order can present a complete record of everything required to perform the work, for the benefit of future estimates, if the work were to be performed again.
The Gold Mine
Furnished with the above information, for every failure and maintenance activity, whether it is corrective or preventive in nature, the Reliability Engineer is able to develop, in time, a wealthy database from which to make specific equipment performance and assess- ment investigations. A subset of this might be to amass
Figure 1: Notification Data (Screen 1)
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statistics on the reliability and failure effects of differ- ent types of equipment, for different types of failure modes, due to different types of causes. Very soon, the Engineer may be enabled to spot patterns indicating weaknesses in production equipment, which in turn present opportunities for driving out failures through effective Engineering, effective preventive maintenance, or effective condition-based maintenance. The latter is where maintenance is triggered by the presence of some measured condition such as run time, cycle time, wear, oil analysis, heat profile, etc.
A large and relatively new offshore oil and gas produc- tion platform on which I worked was faced with a par- ticularly vexing dilemma. The installation was equipped with a SCADA that included a sophisticated network of data acquisition and command modules distributed all over the platform, gathering process data and report- ing the data to operations desks. With all too frequent occurrence, portions of the SCADA network would fail, causing the platform to shut down in a fail safe mode. This was not a good thing.
There seemed to be two failure modes:
1. One was related to marine corrosion of the network cable terminations in the distributed module enclo- sures, which were poorly equipped to protect the internal electronics assembly from the effects of the marine environment.
2. The second was a manufacturer defect in one of the types of electronic network communication modules. As can be imagined, it became critically important to kill both of these problems to keep the platform on stream, and there was a lot of urgency in the air to iso- late these two problems for the following reasons: • Work needed to be done on improving enclosure
integrity, but considering the hundreds of mod- ule enclosures on the platform, which should be addressed first to eliminate 80% of the problem in 20% of the time?
• The manufacturer defect was disputed by the manufacturer. To support the platform’s demand for expedited warranty replacement modules from the manufacturer, failure statistics were required. This is the sort of scenario where the SAP PM capability to record and report on failure statistics can be shown to be invaluable.
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In pursuit of this objective, the Reliability Engineer would request the Planner/Scheduler (or Master Data Custodian) to equip the “Object Part” table of the Noti- fication to include the different SCADA module types to be investigated, if they were not already included in the table. Then the associated “Damage” code cata- log would similarly be equipped with codes suitable to record the damage conditions applicable to those SCADA module types, if they were not already included in the catalog.
With each failure and repair, the Notifications would be equipped with the appropriate information. This would allow Reliability Engineers to track on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis:
• The failure frequency of each failure mode
• The location of the failures, and therefore the associa- tion of failure to environmental conditions
• Other causes of the failures • The specific modules failing
• The effect of the failures in terms of production losses and maintenance costs
In addition, once a remedy was engineered, the success of the remedy could be tracked and verified against the data history gathered.
All of this data would be available from just one SAP PM document, namely the Notification, with the excep- tion of production losses and maintenance costs. The measure of production losses would be a submission from the integrated Production Planning (PP) module of SAP, and the maintenance costs would come from the maintenance Work Order, which is the second SAP PM document useful to a Reliability Engineer, as previously described.