John Q. Todd

Sr. Business Consultant/Product Researcher

Total Resource Management (TRM), Inc. 

Uptime Elements from ReliabilityWeb have been around for many years and have had a positive impact on the reliability and maintenance disciplines. They have helped to organize and visualize all the pieces that may play a role in your improvement efforts.

The question comes when an organization begins to adopt and deploy the concepts of Uptime Elements as to how they might modify Maximo to be a supporting tool. Get yourself a copy of the Elements chart and let’s walk through each of the main categories and explore how Maximo and TRM products can be supportive. While we might not discuss every element in this article, armed with the Elements chart you will discover that Maximo can play a role in or with every single one.

Technical Activities

• REM – Reliability Engineering for Maintenance
• ACM- Asset Condition Management
• WEM – Work Execution Management

REM is focused on the engineering efforts during the design phase of equipment where they consider the maintenance operations. In particular are the Ca – Criticality Analysis and the Rca – Root Cause Analysis elements that are partially reliant upon data and information from the field. The Engineering effort can make use of field data during the design phase, even if the new equipment is intended to be “different.” If the organization has determined the criticality of their Assets in Maximo and is capturing failure states and remedies, the Reliability Engineering function can make good use of this information while they design new systems.

Maximo has out-of-the-box accommodation for both aspects of reliability. The value comes over time as data is collected. Every day that goes by without this degree of data collection is lost in history.

ACM – is focused on the ever-expanding set of tools and techniques we can use to trend equipment performance, foresee problems, and adjust our maintenance approach. Not all of the Elements will apply to your maintenance goals, but some are pretty cool! Technology marches on at a brisk pace. What was “high-tech,” 5 years ago might as well be a buggy whip today.

Maximo fully supports to capture of the results of these tools and techniques, largely out of the box. A good example is Lu – Machinery Lubrication. Leveraging simple functions such as Spare Parts, Asset Classifications/Attributes, Job Plans, and PM definitions, an operation can easily keep track of the lubrication needs of equipment. Putting in the wrong lubricant or even mixing lubricants can have devastating and costly consequences for the equipment and even people.

As a side note: Perhaps look at the Lubrication Information System (LIS) that noria.com has developed. It fits into Maximo quite nicely.

WEM – Ah, managing the work. Perhaps the most critical and real-time endeavor of any organization. Maximo provides “CMMS – Computerized Maintenance Management System,” functionality, but so much more. Maximo is a true Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system that also covers Purchasing, Inventory, Contracts, Help Desk, and many other functions that support the management of work.

A very important element of WEM is Pm – Preventive Maintenance. Maximo provides the infrastructure for an organization to define and execute their PM program with ease. TRM also has supporting products and offerings that make the adoption and standardization of PM activities. Beyond just processing Work Orders and Service Requests, a focus on your approach to performing PMs and the level of detail your teams can benefit from may be an area to look at.

Leadership

• LER – Leadership for Reliability

Maximo is a tool… a means to an end. Those ends, or perhaps better stated, those goals, are established by Leadership. One will find that for a reliability program to achieve a measure of success, there needs to be involvement from leadership across the silos in the typical company. Executives need to sponsor the need for leaders such as Operations, Maintenance, and of course the Reliability function to participate in the improvement activities.

We often forget that the real leaders of any improvement project are those who make the actual change to their daily process. We must support those folks with kind attention as they will make the vision successful.

Business Processes

• AM – Asset Management

Let’s just point this concept directly to an organization having a published Strategic Asset Management Plan (SAMP). If you have more than a handful of assets to manage and maintain, you need to have a documented strategic approach that everyone is on board with. A SAMP points to the approach that will be taken across the types of assets you look after and the methods you will use to make decisions with. The intent is that the SAMP covers the entire lifecycle of your assets… all the way to decommissioning.

How TRM and IDCON can help

TRM and IDCON have joined forces to provide a Maintenance and Reliability assessment that truly helps your organization understand where you are along the spectrum of maturity. Many of the results of the assessment will point to processes and perhaps even people changes you need to make.

TRM also has pre-configured and turn-key Maximo products that can get your organization going quickly and efficiently as you adopt Uptime Elements.

John Q. Todd, Sr. Business Consultant / Product Researcher at TRM. Reach out to us at AskTRM@trmnet.com if you have any questions or would like to discuss deploying MAS 8 or Maximo AAM for condition-based maintenance/monitoring.