Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management

Transcription

1 Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management A solution for implementing Doc Palmer s best practices for planning and scheduling ORACLE WHITE PAPER MAY 2015

2 ASSET VALUE Optimizing asset value and reliability are mission-critical goals for utilities. Working under today's tighter operating constraints, utilities are increasingly challenged by the need to optimize asset performance at a lower cost effectively doing more with less. Maintenance planning and scheduling are central to solving the challenge. When done effectively, they show a direct correlation to improved asset longevity and uptime. With fewer dollars for maintenance operations available, how do utilities realize these benefits? The key lies in using planning and scheduling to achieve increased resource hour availability of the workforce without hiring additional staff. Richard Doc Palmer is a well-known author and expert on the topic of maintenance, with decades of experience as a practioner. His maintenance planning and scheduling methodology provides a framework that can be used to increase workforce productivity without hiring. Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management solution is an ideal tool for implementing his best practices techniques and processes, helping utilities achieve their goals of optimizing asset value and reliability. 1 ORACLE UTILITIES WORK AND ASSET MANAGEMENT - A SOLUTION FOR IMPLEMENTING DOC PALMER S BEST PRACTICES FOR PLANNING AND SCHEDULING

3 DOC PALMER BEST PRACTICES Optimize Asset Performance Optimization of assets has never been more critical to overall utility health, not to mention regulatory and customer trust. Effective maintenance planning and scheduling are integral to ensuring this optimization, reorienting utility personnel to proactive work that avoids error, reduces cost and eliminates inefficiency. This proactive work results in the achievement of two key goals that help maximize the value of mission-critical assets:» Increased productivity of the existing workforce» Improved asset reliability and available capacity Given this, why do so many utilities struggle to effectively plan and schedule maintenance? The main difficulty is getting the workforce to adapt to the amount and speed of change management necessary to optimize asset performance. Simply put, change is something that most people, by nature, resist. The Doc Palmer method is an easy-to-understand, four-step approach to maintenance planning and scheduling that makes change management easier, resulting in increased workforce productivity and asset capacity at a lower operating cost. Figure 1: A Four-Step, Easy-to-Understand Process for Planning and Scheduling 2 ORACLE UTILITIES WORK AND ASSET MANAGEMENT - A SOLUTION FOR IMPLEMENTING DOC PALMER S BEST PRACTICES FOR PLANNING AND SCHEDULING

4 Step 1: Plan and schedule work Doc Palmer s methodology is centered on achieving the goal of using planning and scheduling to get more maintenance work done without hiring. To accomplish that, utilities need to begin by providing more planned work orders, improving work preparation. Maintenance planning is critical to creating a cycle of improvement for work, increasing its quality and boosting productivity. The planner gathers prior job feedback from craft people, resulting in better identification of the skills, labor hours, parts and tools necessary to complete work. In this role as craft historian, the planner then uses the information to continually adjust or create job templates. This cycle of planning improvement helps the workforce to more efficiently complete repeatable tasks and enables utilities to use templates to capture and build organizational knowledge about work. Even as work is done more efficiently due to planning and templates, backlog does not get reduced without scheduling. The impact on backlog provided by scheduling comes from crews having a work week goal that matches labor availability and supervisors being more focused on work completion. When backlog gets reduced, operators are able to report issues that previously went undocumented. In turn, utilities can more readily identify proactive activities that, if done now, eliminate future work and prevent small maintenance problems from growing into larger, costlier ones. A group of 30 maintenance technicians should be performing the work of 47 persons when aided by a single maintenance planner. R. D. (Doc) Palmer PE, MBA, CMRP, McGraw-Hill Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook 3 rd ed., 2013 Step 2: Do the work The next step in asset optimization is scheduling, which is a weekly allocation of work orders to fill the available crew skill hours. It builds upon the benefits gained in planning by enabling activities to be prioritized and executed based on value. Doc Palmer s maintenance scheduling process requires crew leaders to forecast labor for the craft skills available for the following work week. In terms of roles, maintenance planners define a refined list of work orders that can be completed during each crew s work week. Crew leaders schedule job assignments each day and manage break-in work when high priority tasks override the weekly scheduled work. These checks and balances enable supervisors to validate and measure the accuracy of planning estimates, ensuring each day that work assigned matches the ability of the workforce to complete it. The benefit is improved execution of assigned work as utilities are able to:» Get the correct and most important work done on a daily basis.» Respond appropriately to unanticipated work. Even with the most accurate planning and scheduling, work will not always go as planned, so flexibility is important. Crafts people must complete the work to the best of their ability and provide feedback to planners so work plan templates can be improved. Also, just as individual crafts people must sometimes deviate from the plan if necessary to produce quality work, the supervisor should feel comfortable diverging from the weekly schedule if urgent or emergency work arises. 3 ORACLE UTILITIES WORK AND ASSET MANAGEMENT - A SOLUTION FOR IMPLEMENTING DOC PALMER S BEST PRACTICES FOR PLANNING AND SCHEDULING

5 Step 3: Analyze the results The third step in the Doc Palmer process to optimizing assets is measuring the effectiveness of planning and scheduling. By reporting data that answers questions about key performance indicators (KPI), the utility gains insight into how well people and process are driving asset management excellence:» Is planned work at least 80% of all total work each month? If not, are the planners trying to make individual jobs perfect at the expense of not planning enough work, or is management not protecting the planners from other interfering duties?» Does the number of corrective and new job templates created or updated each month reflect a cycle of continual process improvement?» What percentage of scheduled work is being completed each month? If below 40%, are there major problems, such as break downs, or does it reflect a general ignoring of the schedule? If above 90%, does it reflect gaming of the indicator?» Is planning and scheduling leading to a decreasing number of active work orders in the backlog? It cannot be overstated that the purpose of analyzing both work order feedback and schedule completion is not to do well, but to identify what could be improved. What could make each work order better? What were the major reasons for not completing the schedule? Through KPI analysis, utilities will be capable of identifying and isolating barriers to accuracy, efficiency, and productivity. Doing so will set the stage for the final and critical step in optimizing asset performance by planning and scheduling: continually improving maintenance process. Step 4: Continually improve process Maintenance planning and scheduling is ultimately about establishing a cycle of continual improvement, based on the reality that work plans are evolving and procedures and schedules will never be perfect. To create this cycle, work plans and schedules must be continually analyzed for areas of improvement, using hard data and metrics. That analysis should then get fed back into the planning and scheduling process lifecycle, adjusting it where necessary to achieve measurable improvement. Continual process improvement leads to higher productivity and quality of work order completion, usually resulting in more proactive and effective maintenance. This reduces the amount and expense of future workload by eliminating problems before they occur and the betterment of overall asset performance as evidenced in Figure 2. In effect, you will increase your workforce without hiring. Figure 2: Generate More Effective Work Outcomes (from 2014 Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management Conference, Doc Palmer presentation: Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Review) 4 ORACLE UTILITIES WORK AND ASSET MANAGEMENT - A SOLUTION FOR IMPLEMENTING DOC PALMER S BEST PRACTICES FOR PLANNING AND SCHEDULING

6 SOLUTION Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management Optimizing asset performance through improved maintenance planning and scheduling requires the right process and the tool that enables it. The narrow capabilities of many traditional work and asset solutions force onto the utility multitudes of supplemental maintenance software programs, which often reside on only a single employee s personal computer. In contrast, Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management covers all major areas of utility asset infrastructure, from field to plant, and provides a single, consistent source for all relevant work and asset management information e.g., work orders, maintenance schedules, regulatory requirements, resource availability, etc. regardless of location or format. Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management supports a continuous cycle of improvement. A utility can use the solution to optimize the entire asset lifecycle from planning through disposal including all intervening acquisition, construction, maintenance, repair, and inspection activities and can manage purchasing and inventory. Employ Best Practices for Asset Management By using Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management a utility is able to fully implement Doc Palmer s best practices for maintenance planning and scheduling to maximize asset up-time. The solution provides utility-specific, comprehensive and centralized support of all assets and devices, allowing an organization s maintenance work to be requested, planned, prioritized and recorded. Automate Superior Planning and Scheduling:» Use work tools that let you plan ahead for parts and labor requirements.» Rely on proactive and automated maintenance job templates and schedules. Employ Job Templates That Continually Improve Work:» Promote job templates to increase work effectiveness:» Turn corrective work orders into job templates.» Create corrective work orders from job templates.» Push job plan updates from corrective maintenance work orders back into job templates.» Easily find work orders associated with an asset record.» Include detailed notes, labor estimates, equipment, safety information and materials. Build Organizational Knowledge:» Easily capture and share knowledge benchmark standards, best practices, maintenance history, and more. 5 ORACLE UTILITIES WORK AND ASSET MANAGEMENT - A SOLUTION FOR IMPLEMENTING DOC PALMER S BEST PRACTICES FOR PLANNING AND SCHEDULING

7 Turn Resource Availability into Productivity:» Enable corrective work order tasks to be planned against the lowest required skill level and then scheduled to any available personnel, including those that typically do only higher skill-level work. Gain a Big-Picture View of Performance:» Develop, monitor and measure KPIs via a web portal that shows how well maintenance plans are working.» Use predictive analytics to identify causal linkages between KPIs so you can locate and fix problems. Utilities using Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management benefit by improving their visibility to, and handling of, end-to-end asset process, including planning and scheduling. The results are improved workforce performance, proactive asset management, and optimized operating capacity all at reduced costs. 6 ORACLE UTILITIES WORK AND ASSET MANAGEMENT - A SOLUTION FOR IMPLEMENTING DOC PALMER S BEST PRACTICES FOR PLANNING AND SCHEDULING

8 DELIVERING SERVICE AND VALUE FASTER Quick Improvement at a Lower Cost Tighter budgets, regulatory mandates, and heightened expectation for capital investment return are just some of the pressures mounting on you to do more with less, and do it faster. With Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management, you can quickly achieve the benefits of Doc Palmer s method for maintenance planning and scheduling without busting your budget or blowing up your timeline. The solution, built upon our extensive experience designing utility-specific solutions and a rich history in data and process management, includes embedded best practices designed to enhance operational efficiency and reduce cost. Additionally, the Oracle Utilities consulting services team delivers value during implementations that ensures you steer clear of unnecessary functionality that drives up cost or limited technology that inhibits performance. You ll gain business improvements more quickly and cost effectively via a streamlined production environment that includes:» Extensive out-of-the-box process flows, built upon utility best practices, for full visibility and accountability and flexible business rules encompassing virtually all work scenarios» Tailored training, geographic localization and management to reduce time to productivity» The largest partner network of system integrators to ensure you get the capabilities you need delivered the right way and on time 7 ORACLE UTILITIES WORK AND ASSET MANAGEMENT - A SOLUTION FOR IMPLEMENTING DOC PALMER S BEST PRACTICES FOR PLANNING AND SCHEDULING

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