Being a Maintenance Manager can be a very rewarding job, but it can also come with huge challenges and pressures around effective management of costs, time, safety, efficiencies and much more.

At Add Energy, we understand the highs and lows you face with maintenance management. In this blog, we have combined some top tips for becoming an even more effective Maintenance Manager, despite the challenging environment you work in...

It is a known fact that planned preventative maintenance is significantly more cost-effective than breakdown maintenance or replacing expensive parts. For many companies, preventative maintenance is seen as an investment - one that must be carefully balanced, planned, and scheduled to reap the economic and safety benefits so that the return on investment (ROI) can be realized. 

Without a meticulously planned preventative maintenance management regime, companies are subject to increased risk of equipment failure, loss of production, and excessive maintenance costs.

Good scheduling is key to a successful maintenance regime, however many factors can impact your ability to execute maintenance as originally planned. Delaying work can be inevitable, and this can lead to significant challenges for maintenance teams - from managing increased risk to inefficiencies and complexities when planning.

Add Energy’s Simon Fisher, Project Director, and Danny McGowan, Operations Manager, have conducted a deep dive on maintenance deferment, discussing why this occurs, what the impact can be and advice for asset and maintenance teams for effectively minimizing risk and reducing the need for deferrals.

Logistics Managers can significantly reduce risks and unlock major efficiencies by deploying RFID tagging across key equipment. Having instant access to accurate, reliable information provided by unique identification tags can help you to protect the value of your plant or company, identify cost and resource saving opportunities, and minimize risk.

At a base level, RFID tagging allows you to very easily know what is what. It gives your equipment a digital identity, and allows you to associate detailed information with that identity - such as where it’s been, its current location, its service history, its cost, its maintenance, and much more - so that strategic decisions can be made with confidence.

In this blog post, we explore the key benefits RFID tagging can bring to Logistics Managers…

David Logie recently joined the Add Energy team as an Engineer within our Asset and Integrity Management division. With a background in mechanical maintenance in the energy sector, we wanted to chat with David to learn about the challenges he faced working within a fast-paced maintenance environment, and uncover his lessons learned and tips for ensuring maintenance is conducted as effectively and efficiently as possible.

As a result of the ongoing global pandemic, the ability to resource for maintenance execution has become a challenge for many companies and has resulted in a significant increase in maintenance backlog.

When there is a bow-wave of work to manage, it is crucial to look for opportunities to prioritize and liquidate work effectively, based on risk and capacity.

A backlog prioritization model or study will determine the risks associated with delaying the work further and will facilitate the decision-making process to determine which work orders should be executed as a priority. Once this has been established, companies can apply execution techniques to liquidate the maintenance in the most efficient and effective way possible.

In this blog, Add Energy’s Senior Consultant, Emeka Onuh discusses how routing, sequencing, and packaging maintenance work orders can make maintenance execution much more efficient, and the profound effects it can have on improving plant and system availability, maintenance team productivity as well as safety.

While most organisations utilize these methods to some degree, they are often disjointed or misunderstood. We recommend viewing this as a combined strategy, with all three elements being reviewed and implemented, to get the most value for your business. Here are some of his top tips on how to successfully implement all three methods.

Ongoing challenges relating to a global pandemic and subsequent low oil price have significantly enhanced the focus on how assets can be run more efficiently. But efficiently doesn’t just mean the lowest cost model, it must include maintaining acceptable risk profiles, and regardless of the challenges and limitations, there are always improvement opportunities to be realized.

In my own experience, I have seen significant improvements identified on both new and mature plants. Savings on older assets, have been in excess of $20M per year, by removing non-value adding maintenance, and for newer plants, savings of $500k+ by modifying the maintenance schedules and spares requirements dictated by the OEMs, moving to maintenance that is tailored to the operating criteria and design intent.

Before joining Add Energy as Technical Manager, Stuart Murray had worked his way up from maintenance, reliability and operations engineering roles to the Head of Maintenance for an international FPSO operator. 

Responsible for managing global maintenance execution and strategies, optimizing maintenance effectiveness and providing expert advice on maintenance issues, Stuart has experienced and overcome many common maintenance and operational challenges throughout his career. We have asked him to share some of the biggest challenges and lessons he has learned as Head of Maintenance..

Being a Maintenance Manager can be a very rewarding, yet challenging role. A Maintenance Manager is typically accountable for ensuring maintenance is executed correctly, on time and within budget to assure the safety and integrity of the facility, and that uptime and reliability targets are achieved. 

The biggest enemy of maintenance and reliability is unplanned downtime. While planned downtime is inevitable when managing a plant, unplanned downtime is often one of the largest challenges and expenses.

When production has to cease unexpectedly because of a broken part or safety issue, time needs to be urgently spent to identify the problem, fix it, and ensure there are no ancillary issues before restarting. This is highly disruptive and costly, and maintenance teams are therefore always striving to avoid unexpected failures or breakdowns.