Demand Warranty For Standalone Equipment Turnaround Maintenance

SYNOPSIS

Leadership Excellence in Safety & Reliability

Demand Warranty For

Standalone Equipment Turnaround Maintenance

In equipment systems, Fail-Restore-Fail-Restore.... situation is a troublesome cycle. Repetitive malfunctions, failures with one or other equipment and restoring them could require high intensity engagement just to hold the datum of performance, leave alone improving it. Industry Leaders could face these situations more than once. These cannot be fully eliminated but processes can be driven to minimize them. The leadership has to reckon with the question: whether we control the events or events control us?

Equipment Turnarounds offer the right window to drive certain preventive processes to achieve manageable level of reliability of the equipment. Prevention of a problem would mean, in normal operation the equipment system delivers flawless performance with an online inspection and PM program. “Preventive Process” means the management process by which the malfunction, the failure event is not allowed to happen. Once happened, the process adopted for restoring the normalcy would be the “corrective process”.

While the day to day demands of the routine must be handled with the corrective processes to hold the performance datum, initiating concurrent preventive processes is necessary. The preventive processes with a standalone start reach the Fail-Restore cycle and gradually reduce its spread.

But once these processes start becoming effective, the problems which were regular earlier could disappear fully. This will need to be recognized.

It is a legitimate expectation that after the Turnaround of an equipment, it would remain free of any defects till its next Turnaround. This with a matching Online Inspection and PM program. Embedding the requirement of “assurance” enhances the managers’ performance. This forces them to tap on their competence to deliver the right performance. When we buy domestic appliances with “Warranty”, why not apply the same principle for the equipment which is undergoing Turnaround for rejuvenation? Ultimately the objective of the “Warranty” is “Safe & Trouble Free Operation” (STFO). This approach stimulates a process of continual improvement through learning. A Process Equipment requires multiple “Assurances”. In a petroleum Refinery equipment, a set of eight “Assurances” forms a reasonable “Warranty”. These relate to Reliability, occupational and process safety.

These can only be given after assuring existence of the required features, their reliability, assurance of practices and procedures. In the Refinery which these were implemented, for each of the Assurance the respective ingredients were identified and proper templates were designed to capture all the ingredients. These Eight Assurances together constituted the requisite “Warranty”. The practice is to receive the so called “STFO Warranty” in hand & give “OK” for equipment re-commissioning after the Turnaround. This brought about a significant improvement in planning and quality of execution. Managers’ buy-in became stronger by each such “STFO Warranty”. The generation of Work Orders after the Turnaround was monitored which became a source of learning for the next equipment.

The entire process was written on Deming’s cycle basis and implemented.

The key aspect is the demand of “Warranty” for the Turnaround maintenance. Implementing it across all the plants is desirable, but in the first Phase only standalone equipment was targeted. Using a visual identity through a “Warranty Symbol” adds to the profile of such approach and develops a value system that the equipment under Warranty shall not fail. This contributes to improving the quality assurance culture, deliberate engagement in learning from past failures and consequently reliability.

When it takes root, it makes a difference.