With our background and close links with Haden Freeman Ltd, an engineering consultancy, it will be unsurprising to learn that we have a lot of capability and know-how when it comes to improving the reliability and maintenance performance of your plant.

We have a large toolkit available to us, and we have capability in nearly all reliability tools and techniques - more than can be listed here. So, if there is something you are interested in that is not listed please enquire.

We offer a range of approaches for improving plant reliability, including

• Planned Maintenance Optimisation (PMO); training, facilitation and implementation

A PMO activity is based upon Reliability Centred Maintenance techniques and theory, but aims to leverage existing knowledge and plant history to reduce the time and effort to deliver performance improvements. The approach works well when there is a lot of plant history and embedded knowledge and experience in the engineering team.

• Total Productive Maintenance(TPM) and Overall Equipment Effectiveness(OEE) Kaizen events to rapidly address reliability, production losses and chronic outages

TPM is a more holistic approach involving more stakeholders and influencers of reliability such as operations, introduces autonomous maintenance, and improves the current physical condition of plant and equipment through the Condition Cycle (or Deep Clean activity) giving a quicker uplift in reliability. TPM also have its own methodology to identify causes of plant failures known as P-M Analysis (Phenomenon or Physical Mechanism Analysis).

• Root Cause Analysis support including training, facilitation, coaching and mentoring, system design and implementation

Root Cause Analysis is a favourite approach of ours, due to its surprisingly quick results and good return on effort - the bang for buck. Root Causes Analysis focuses on the current issues, as they occur, so all effort expended in undertaking an RCA is only on extant issues, preventing each issue from re-occurring in the future and so steadily chipping away at failure modes leading to increased reliability. With the correct RCA process design superb data can be collected on patterns, trends and common failure themes which allows macro analysis techniques to be applied, which can then be used to select small proactive projects to prevent future failures before they occur, accelerating the rate of reliability improvement.

• Identification and implementation of Plant Condition Monitoring (PCM) for improved plant reliability, in particular “5 Senses” condition monitoring which works well when maintenance personnel are assigned ownership of specific production units and areas

A good principle for achieving good performance is that of ownership and accountability. Knowing what one is responsible for and being held to account for its delivery can really focus people's minds and empower them to achieve. Applying this principle to maintenance personnel has delivered great results for us in the past, and has sometimes involved the introduction of new roles in the engineering department. Along with this comes the need to inspect and understand what is going on with a plant to detect the early warning signs in failure. PCM techniques can greatly help in improving plant reliability. This does not have to be hugely technical - simple 5 Senses conditioning monitoring is powerful and flexible.

• Autonomous Maintenance by operators, which links closely to TPM and “5 Senses” condition monitoring

Operators are usually stationed on the factory floor or spend large amounts of time around the equipment. Who better then to look out for detect any changes or issues before they become breakdowns. This is where Autonomous Maintenance (AM) comes in - getting operators to feedback intelligence on the condition and issues on the plant so that action can be taken to prevent, mitigate and proactively deal with issues before they become a breakdown. The trick to successful Autonomous Maintenance implementation is usually to assign operators tasks that have zero time cost to them, and to ensure any reported issues are quickly dealt with and fed back.

These are a few of the techniques we have available to us to help you improve your site's reliability and maintenance performance. We are flexible, and even if we are engaged to implement one particular tool if we see situations where another technique will help we will adapt our approach. After all, the objective is not usually the tool, but improved performance. We are not precious in how we achieve that.