W H A T ' S A L L T H E B U Z Z A B O U T
By: Paul B. Elkins
Georgetown Utility Systems

Some of us use an Big
Chief Tablet or something similar to document our maintenance activities.
But what if these written records are lost or illegible?

Others may rely on our staffs memories to document what, where and how our maintenance is performed.
But what if they are unavailable when key decisions or questions arise?

Basically there are two types:
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Computerized Maintenance Management Systems
(CMMS)
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Enterprise Asset Management Systems (EAMS)
Both systems are similar in operational characteristics and both provide a realistic way to reduce expenses and increase revenues.
These systems provide for and assist with:


Maintaining an adequate inventory level of repair and service parts based on forecasted equipment usage.
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They can help prevent already limited funds from being over-allocated just to achieve a false sense of security.

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They can provide for an effective preventive maintenance program to improve equipment utilization and availability thereby limiting the replacement of expensive equipment when finances restrict.
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They provide companies an operational savings that are real and tangible.

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They can provide for a return on investment
(ROI) that is often quickly achieved and easily quantified.

Many regard EAMS as a CMMS on steroids.
A CMMS typically deals strictly within the confines of the work order and the preventive maintenance activity.
Both systems include:

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Scheduling preventive maintenance based on triggers
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Ensure probability-based availability repair and spare parts
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Serial number and warranty tracking

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Suggesting and originating the purchase of needed repair parts
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Ensuring manpower availability with skills and training to perform activity
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Maintaining an asset registry and repair parts database

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Tracking costs of maintaining individual pieces of equipment
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Recording unexpected events for further analysis
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Statistical analysis of equipment

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Providing a variety of reports, such as:
 equipment utilization
 equipment downtime
 MTBF—equipment mean time between failure
 MTTR—equipment mean time to repair

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Both types of systems usually include purchasing, procurement, inventory management, as well as equipment, parts, and asset tracking. They also can schedule preventive maintenance and manage these activities as well as unplanned maintenance. These products are designed to plan production work around any maintenance issues to optimize production.
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EAM systems encompass these functions and most often extend their capabilities, with many features that can provide value added functionality, and savings to your company. They have features such as financial, accounting and human resource management capabilities that are typically integrated with an EAM that normally are not with a CMMS.

EAM systems are also designed to scale to larger numbers of users and facilitate running at multiple sites from a single central database, thereby catering better to entire enterprises, rather than departmental or individual location needs.

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EAM systems offer a more robust methodology for documenting equipment and their parts to include warranties, schematics, and computer aided design drawings.

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EAM systems, once your data is entered into the common database, it immediately becomes available to the other modules. As a result, information can be recycled, remain consistent, and updated, and never has to be entered twice.

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EAM systems provide better and more conclusive analysis of the maintenance, repairs and material replacement alternatives.

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EAM systems can be used to provide functionality to calculate the cost of failure based on the downtime costs multiplied by the downtime plus any additional repair.

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EAM systems also provide an additional analysis with cost prevention, which is based on the cost of the maintenance service, including labor and parts, over the same period of time as the mean time between failures.

1.
Is having a system available to your company to perform financial analysis on equipment based on historical trends and a preventive maintenance schedule?
2.
Is maintaining equipment costing your company more than the value it is providing?

With a EAM System you will have the ability to consider the financial impacts of a major system equipment overhaul using interfaces with fixed asset modules for determining if the activity will significantly extend the useful life and/or generate depreciable expense to warrant the activity.
A major differentiator of EAM software is the reliability-centered maintenance concept.

A CMMS focus is on the work order history for maintenance and operation of equipment.

Enterprise – Is management across multiple departments, organizations, locations and business units.
Asset Management – Is the whole life optimal management of physical assets to maximize their value, life expectancy and performance.

A EAM Systems focus on the entire equipment life cycle from purchase and installation to decommissioning and removal/replacement.

To create a level of management of assets across multiple business units, where organizations can improve equipment utilization and performance for the reduction of capital and operational costs for providing the extension of life and to improve the return on investment for assets.

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Management of
Assets across entire organization
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Maximize infrastructure useful life and return on assets

Asset
Assemblies or parts of classified as critical to systems
ID by unique or serialized number
Requires regular or prescribed maintenance & inspections
Commissioning cost is tracked for capitalization or depreciation
Has intrinsic value
Re-usable, repairable
Not typically an Asset
Run to fail assemblies – non critical to systems
No unique ID number
Run to fail – no maintenance or inspection required
Low replacement value that is not tracked
No value just a part
Buy – Use – Dispose

EAM systems allow you to execute work orders for preventive or scheduled maintenance of a piece of equipment; document all activities performed by action types including parts replaced, labor associated and types of maintenance performed to keep equipment in good order.
EAM system stores this information for equipment within the equipment records of a defined hierarchy structure for systematic rollup of all actions.

Just like a family tree, a EAM System is set up through a hierarchical structure of organizations, systems, positions and assets.
In the hierarchy structure the costs of parts, labor, equipment and tools are tracked to a position within the hierarchy for installations, replacement and de-commissioning of assets.

The hierarchy structure allows the tracking of asset history at the assigned position with ability of cost rollup all the way to the top of the organization.
Equipment status’s and performance history can be monitored, and can even be transferred within or between departments in the systems hierarchy.
This approach allows users and management to evaluate condition of assets and life cost.
Through performance tracking and root failure analysis, changes to equipment type or equipment maintenance strategy can be applied to equipment with repeat failure or reoccurring needs for additional maintenance.

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In addition, EAM users will need to:
 Develop organizational structure
 Develop systematic plan for cost roll up

Service Lifecycle Management
◦ Minimize total cost of assets through use of life cycle cost analysis
◦ Minimize expensive replacement of assets where regular maintenance would have extended life and increased utility revenues
◦ Decreasing customer downtime from premature failures and overtime labor cost for restoration of service following failures
◦ Minimize customer losses in production, unfavorable publicity and increase retention

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Management of inventory, parts and labor allocations for preventive maintenance.

Providing risk registers and work order planning/scheduling.

Systematic methods of problem identification, root cause analysis and continuous improvement of equipment utilized on utility systems.

EAM provides a holistic view of an organization's asset base, enabling managers to control and optimize their utility operations and choices of equipment used for quality and efficiency. It also provides platform for connecting people, processes, assets and industry-based knowledge.

There are four basic types of maintenance procedures.
Each types can be used in maintaining power distribution equipment.
The challenge is to optimize the balance between the types for maximum reliability.

Corrective Maintenance – is maintenance that is carried out following detection of an anomaly and aimed at restoring normal operating conditions. The belief here is costs sustained for the downtime and repair are lower than the investment of a maintenance program.

Preventive Maintenance – is maintenance carried out at pre-determined intervals or according to prescribed criteria, aimed at reducing the failure risk or performance degradation of the equipment.

Risk-based Maintenance – is maintenance carried out by integrating analysis, measurement and periodic test activities to standard preventive maintenance. The aim is to perform the asset condition and risk assessment to define the appropriate maintenance program.

Condition-based Maintenance – is maintenance based on the equipment's performance through monitoring and the control of the corrective actions taken. The equipment is continuously assessed by comparing working device parameters and average values and performance. Maintenance is performed when indicators give the signals that the equipment is deteriorating and the failure probability is increasing.

When implementing a EAM system, considerations for integrating with other systems to reduce manual transfers of information and procedures.
Some to consider are:

Normally the base of EAM systems is a GIS system that serves as a spatial reference location map. These spatial systems allow for graphic representation of your assets, ease of work order creation at the levels desired and ability through natural integration to push features of new or edited asset information into your EAM system.

Generally work orders for new or changes to a utilities customers begin with their CIS. In most cases it is official record in most utilities for the necessary customer information such as address, name, contact information, meter identification and previous read information. In addition to this information some utilities have meter data management systems and AMI metering information that may need to be conveyed to the work orders.

Work orders generally require parts, and most utilities have systems in place to handle the purchasing, stocking and issuing of parts. The ability to integrate these systems gives EAM users the ability to reserve or pre-order parts for scheduled work orders on a just in time basis to keep part quantities and purchase cost at a minimum.
Some work orders may require parts that are long lead or require special order processes. The ability to integrate the two systems allows users to schedule work orders in accordance with availability and issuance of parts for a positive work flow.

Other integrations to consider depending on your utility include:
◦ OMS Systems – for potential work order creation and processing as OMS predicts outages from customer calls or AMI reporting.
◦ Design Systems – for interaction of designed assets into your EAM system for tracking of new installation work orders

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Define your current work flow processes and identify desired changes to these processes from manual to manual or manual to automated.
Define compatibility restrictions between proposed integrations of systems like the versions of software's.
Even if you desire to keep some work processes manual, the EAM implementation may alter these existing manual processes and you need to identify all aspects of these too.

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Tables containing employees labor rates
Trade classes and categories
User restrictions
Equipment classes and categories
Adaptability of hierarchy for future
Work order screen set up and process flow
Preventive maintenance processes and frequency
System accessibility and mobility
Change management plan for deployment
Communications plan for deployment

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From the integrations side consider all systems impacted. Remember these integrations are not trivial in design or construction. One system has to be official location of data and other systems use the data. So determining exact locations for official records is also a requirement. You need to determine frequency of data syncing and what to do if they go out of sync.

Review and identify the roles and responsibilities of both users and management

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Allow for all time commitments and resources when designing and construction interfaces even if some of your planned functions seem to be overkill or only half are desired.
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Be careful in purchasing a stand-alone solutions that sometimes oversimplify interface issues by suggesting the availability application programming interfaces or software-based integration services. They may also pressure you into buying more modules than you need.

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It can always a wise approach to be a
“Doubting Thomas” in making these decisions. Also, it is always a clear case to do your homework beforehand and not rely solely on claims from the providing vendors.
Check out references:
◦ On installation vendors
◦ Installations of systems
◦ End users of these systems
◦ Performance issues pre and post installation