Page 284 - Improving Machinery Reliability

Maintenance and Benchmarking Reliability 255

e Accountability for reliability. Refiners who have achieved control of their facili-
ties’ performance and reliability have assigned individuals to be accountable for
success of the operating units. This accountability is assigned in writing and may
typically be included in three-to-five year operating plans. Such plans include the
maintenance and reliability performance targets, objectives, budgets, reliability
improvement spending for problem equipment, and the job performance expecta-
tions for each position in their organizations. Where accountability is absent, cost
effective, organized problem solving and results are seldom observed.

Organizational Style and Structure

Recent worldwide maintenance and reliability management analyses have provid-
ed insight into organizational issues that affect maintenance efficiency and reliability
effectiveness:

Maintenance cost-a stewardship role for process operations. Processing is the
reason for the refinery to exist. It must have support from all other departments to
cany out plans formulated by the company’s management. In this sense, it is not
difficult to envision Process Operations as the custodian or “owner” of the process-
ing machinery and equipment in addition to the hydrocarbon streams they control
and direct. Furthermore, because operating assets are the sole source of revenue
generation, it is similarly plausible to consider Process Operations as responsible for
the equipment’s integrity, with maintenance and engineering in subsidiary roles.
This concept is gaining acceptance and has been seen to strengthen the review of
actual need of specific maintenance work and to stimulate operating personnel into
increased awareness of their roles as the eyes and ears of the operating equipment.
Maintenance organization structure. Solomon Associates has identified eight
structural models that classify most existing organizations. These models are based
on how the maintenance group is departmentalized and where in the organization
resource consumption is prioritized: centrally or distributed to refinery subdivi-
sions. The Management Task model is characteristic of the best performers. As
opposed to an organization by craft lines or by maintenance task type (mechanical,
civil, electrical), the Management Task model provides planning and systems, cen-
tral shops and stores services, and maintenance engineering departments to support
a work-execution group. The better performers are represented equally by area
assignment and central assignment approaches to controlling the workforce, but all
employ centralized control of maintenance policy and work priority determination.
No organizations employing an operating area team or “business-unit” approach of
distributed maintenance are represented in the better performers group.
* Use of process operators. Several refineries have tapped the resourcefulness of
their process operators to contribute to reliability improvement and maintenance.
Recognizing that the always-present operating forces can be the first line of defense
against equipment failures, there refineries have provided training and motivation to
increase the operators’ awareness of equipment difficulties and to perform light
maintenance tasks which remove both the consumption of maintenance man-hours
and the administrative burden of processing the associated work orders.