Our Work

Rapid Bill of Materials development

Scope: WMS provided leadership, project management and Bill of Material Developers to develop Bills of Materials across multiple mine sites assets. In total a team of 15 personnel were mobilised and engaged to execute the program in a short time frame.

Value: A step change in the number or Bills of Materials and their use. This improved Maintenance Planner efficiency and parts ordering accuracy.

Multi-site master data build

Scope: Develop naming conventions and master data for remote power stations including functional location hierarchy and core asset structure, asset life plans, maintenance strategies and tactics. Identify and develop maintenance and task specific parts listings for all assets pre utilisation phase of the assets life cycle.

Success:  A turnkey solution supplied to the operations department including all maintenance requirements and scheduling frequencies, maintenance and task specific Application Parts Lists and operating statistic profiles.  This information allowed history to be built from the commissioning phase of the assets life cycle improving reliability analysis, cost analysis, ease of capitalisation of new assets and the optimisation of resources and stock holding during the utilisation phase of the physical assets.

Value: Documented process for the building of all master data for all new assets acquired by the organisation so this step in the operational readiness plan can be performed within the organisation for future newly constructed power stations. The above will ensure that the appropriate training, procedures and systems are in place to minimise the asset life cycle costs and maximize the payback period of the assets.

Shutdown optimisation

Scope: Review and optimisation of the main plant shutdown cycle of a leading WA process plant.

Success: review of the operating strategy, maintenance strategy, frequency, and drivers for the current shutdown cycle.  Following the review the CMMS master data was aligned to the updated shutdown cycle including all statutory and regulatory tasks.

Value: The organisation was able to drop one shutdown from the year reducing the annual maintenance budget by $590,000 while not effecting the plant availability or reliability.

Mobile equipment maintenance standards

Scope: Support the deployment of maintenance standards in Work Management across Pilbara Iron.  Using our clients internal assessment tool, a study against established standards was undertaken to identify areas of improvement.  This engagement was conducted in partnership with the Maintenance Systems team who oversee governance and provided detailed assessment of performance through maintenance KPIs.   To ensure appropriate governance mechanisms are in place, aspects of ongoing sustainability were incorporated as enabling success factors.  In order to more broadly meet these standards a process for further deployment, with supporting guidelines, was developed.

Success: Key Work Management Steps assessed against the standard with findings identified through site interactions and interviews.  A number of mobile maintenance metrics (KPIs) were reviewed to validate and verify findings.  Recommendations were then established based not only on gaps, but also priority with consideration to business context and value/ease.  Consideration was made to classifying recommendations around : Process, Awareness, Understanding, Compliance and Effectiveness.  In addition it was agreed to include touch points with Tactics Implementation and Defect Elimination, and these were assessed separately.  An assessment of Sustainability with the site leadership team was conducted to establish critical success factors to ensure long term sustainability.  The Work Management standard itself was revised against a new framework with 4 levels of assessment (Poor/Fair/Good/Excellent) and to provide greater alignment.

Value: The primary value of improving standards of work management will be in the safe, effective and efficient implementation of maintenance strategies and tactics in support of the Strategic Plan.  This will better ensure the reliability of equipment and minimise unnecessary downtime.  Collectively this will have a significant positive impact on Availability of mobile equipment which is considered essential to achieving growth targets.  Finally this will ensure better labour productivity through the optimised utilisation of labour as a result of better planning and scheduling, and avoidance of rework.  A greater attention on performance metrics through measuring the right things in the right way, will provide for an improved program of defect elimination avoiding major sources of waste.

Increased production audit

Scope: Complete an asset audit to determine the condition of an in service coal handling plant for a major WA coal mining operation.  Determine the plant capability and develop maintenance strategies to support an increased throughput from 2.7MTPA to 5MTPA.

Success: Plant audit completed with equipment condition profiles documented and a plan developed to address current plant maintenance requirements.

Value: Plant capability identified and integrated into the product delivery chain to establish the new operational strategy required to achieve the increased tonnage throughput target of 5Mtpa. Maintenance shutdown drivers identified and the maintenance strategy moved to a primary maintenance driven shut down cycle to deliver increased availability while minimising the asset life cycle costs.

The development of a resource profile for the Coal Handling Plant to identify the resources required to perform the maintenance planning and execution functions effectively.

Zero based budgeting

Scope: The Development of a Zero Based Budgeting process to build the maintenance budget at a leading mineral processing facility.  This included the development of budgeting procedure documentation and the building of reports and master data within the organisations Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS) to support the process.

Value: This raised the accuracy of the maintenance budget by 20% and reduced the time taken to build the budget by 25%.

Maintenance and reliability strategic review

Scope: Use of Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) & Failure Modes Effects Criticality Analysis (FMECA) to review the maintenance strategy of a leading WA process plant that had low availability and reliability causing low tonnages and high maintenance costs.

Success: Optimised maintenance strategy and tactics were identified the CMMS was aligned with the new strategy

Value: Availability of the plant area went from 60% to 85%, the effects costs were lowered by $800,000 over the ten years of the RCM model, the shutdown durations were known prior to entering the shutdown and the small shutdowns went from 60 hours in duration to 36 hours. An additional benefit was the ability to resource level the shutdowns accurately.

Centralised planning

Scope: Development of an Intranet home page for a Maintenance Planning Department at an Australian mine site

Success: This was achieved by identifying the business value chain, and the primary interactions at each step in the process.  The integration between the different business streams was identified and procedures developed for the various activities required for a Maintenance Planner to perform their required function.  The Shutdown Planner, Maintenance Planner and Schedulers job descriptions were then defined and documented. These documents were then loaded up onto the newly developed Intranet Home page and rolled out to the Planning department.

Value: Processes were documented, understood and controlled making the planning department more effective and efficient.  The planning process is transparent and measurable.  Storing this information in a central location enabled effective knowledge management mitigating the effect of inexperienced personnel and high staff turnover.

Locomotive overhaul

Scope: Improve the locomotive overhaul maintenance management process across three fleets of locomotives to achieve overhaul program compliance. The pre-existing process had limited structure and tools and significant amount of wasted time due to disorganisation, which resulted in the initial overhauls exceeding their planned completion date. The issues encountered included limited ability to measure and track progress, components and materials supply shortages impacted progress, disorganisation in the work area and there was no central management system such as a CMMS was utilised. In addition, an improvement in the execution period of each overhaul was required to achieve overhaul program compliance. The key improvement initiatives were to implement a work management structure, set-up and manage overhauls through the CMMS (SAP) and determine the optimum resource requirements to achieve overhaul program compliance.

Success: A work management structure was developed utilising the overhaul scopes of works for the three fleets of locomotives and uploaded in the CMMS (SAP). To create the structure each scope was dissected into discrete tasks, task durations defined, tasks sequenced and grouped and critical paths mapped. The resource options were defined and analysed to determine the optimum resource allocation vs. execution time. This exercise achieved an improvement in planned base execution time (day shift only) of 20% reduction was achieved. A further 30% reduction for a total reduction of 50% over planned base execution was achieved with resourcing on day and afternoon shift. The work and storage areas were also reviewed and improved, with the installation of new storage racks with component allocations and demarcated staging areas within the workshop.

Value: The improvement of the overhaul maintenance management process delivered a work management structure and tools that enabled the team to effectively plan, schedule and execute the locomotive overhauls within their CMMS (SAP). An improvement was achieved in the ability to measure and track progress, component and material requirements were clearly identified and managed within the CMMS system. The project has provided an organised structure to minimise the wasted previously experienced in managing overhauls. This has realised additional capacity, in particular the frontline leadership team, to perform quality field time.