The biggest cost saving initiatives for maintenance teams

During a time where budgets are being scrutinised and cut, we are forced to work smarter with less resources. This is particularly true for maintenance teams due to maintenance being commonly viewed as an expense rather than an opportunity to save money for an asset. 

To use maintenance and materials management as a mechanism for saving money, we need to strike the perfect balance between cost cutting and risk mitigation – where maintenance and materials can be streamlined to gain efficiencies and reduce costs, but integrity and production are not compromised. 

Our team has achieved some fantastic savings for our clients through independent review and analysis, ranging from a reduction in annual maintenance costs by $20 million, to unlocking millions of dollars worth of capital tied up in unnecessary spares. In this blog post, we have identified 3 of our solutions that have the capacity to unlock the biggest cost savings for maintenance teams, without compromising integrity or production…

Maintenance improvement study

Our maintenance improvement study is focused on finding efficiency gains and opportunities to optimise maintenance to save money whilst ensuring safety and reliability. 

By reviewing your maintenance strategy allocation and available historic data, benchmarking this against our library of best practice maintenance from over 1,000 assets worldwide, and tapping into the experience of our consultants, we can provide you with insights and recommendations to optimise your maintenance and significantly reduce costs. 

We are essentially a highly experienced fresh pair of eyes, that will search for improvement opportunities for your asset(s). Examples of our findings include areas where companies are:

• Over-maintaining equipment, where Add Energy would provide recommendations for effectively and carefully reducing maintenance to avoid increasing the risk profile 
• Not conducting enough maintenance, where we would share insights that showcase what additional maintenance will minimise costly breakdowns or unplanned downtime
• Duplicating maintenance, where we would share our advice to resolve this unnecessary extra work
• Inefficient maintenance allocation, where we would provide recommendations for how maintenance can be packaged, routed or sequenced to reduce the maintenance burden and allow for more efficient and effective maintenance execution  

Using our bespoke Aim-Hi™ software, our extensive library of maintenance strategies, and our specialist maintenance experience across all disciplines, we can provide a detailed roadmap filled with actionable insights to help you optimise expenditure, unlock efficiencies and enhance safety. 

Maintenance plan optimisation

Another solution designed and proven to optimise maintenance expenditure is the process of maintenance plan optimisation where maintenance tasks are packaged, routed and sequenced into logical groups, enabling maintenance execution to be much more efficient and will help to ensure you are using your maintenance team to maximum capacity.

• Routing maintenance is when you group short duration jobs for like equipment, usually within proximity to each other. For example creating a maintenance route to cover all gas detectors by zone, as opposed to generating 1 work order per gas detector 
• Sequencing maintenance is focused on developing a synchronised schedule for multiple jobs for 1 equipment type, such as maintenance on diesel generator whereby the 6 monthly and yearly tasks would be suppressed when the 2 yearly was triggered
• Packaging can be used to maintain different types of equipment at the same time across a defined boundary, like a package or a system. This works well for drivers, driven and auxiliary equipment located on one skid, for example.

To do this, ABL’s maintenance experts will utilise their in depth knowledge and experience, in collaboration with our load levelling software to optimise your maintenance plan, providing you with a CMMS upload file containing the optimised maintenance plan, level loaded to the week, enabling maintenance schedulers to effectively schedule maintenance to the day. 

To shed some more light on how this can be achieved, we have broken each of these tactics down, and Hossein Ghavimi, our load levelling guru, has shared his top tips and insights for implementing these effectively.

Disposal of surplus stock

By conducting a spares criticality study, we can identify spare parts that should be stocked and what the stock levels should be based on risk, cost and consequence, as well as spares that do not need to be held, due to various reasons including obsolescence, short lead times, manufacturer held strategy, etc. Once the optimal spares holding has been identified, we work with companies to dispose and sell off unneeded spares to unlock significant capital tied up in spares for your business.

Ultimately, this is an independent review that shows you what you need, including the minimum and maximum levels, and gives you the confidence to get rid of stock that is not actually required. This isn’t as simple as disposing of the stock you haven’t used in the last five years. You need to assess your stock against your risk profile, and make educated decisions based on reliable information. 

Once the initial study is complete, we then review the spares that can be disposed of to identify what can be sold. This involves a site visit and inspection, as well as the preparation of a valuation to showcase how and where the parts can be sold, and how much for.