Quest Reliability leverages many years of process plant experience to assist process facilities in improving their profitability in addition to their safety and environmental performance.  These gains are achieved through an understanding of how best to manage static as well as rotating plant through a reliability management focus on hardware, and systemic and organizational issues critical to the business. 

Process manufacturing performance can be maximized through an integrated approach to reliability management, a simple concept, but one that is complex in the execution.  A few leading process manufacturers operate at asset utilization rates in the 90-95% range, but these performance levels are rare, and most continuous manufacturing facilities operate around 80% or less.  The difference between these utilization rates equates to an enormous loss in protit and production efficiency potential business potential.  Quest Reliability has worked extensively with petrochemical and refining facilities, helping operators understand how to develop and execute robust manufacturing excellence programs that often lead to material utilization gains.

Quest Reliability Approach to Plant Reliability Management Audits

Reliability management focuses primarily on processes, systems and hardware (the plant) critical to the business.  When well-defined and replicable processes and systems are embedded into the organization and operations, management of the plant assets becomes a routine task for the plant engineers.  The Quest Reliability reliability management audit process consists of the following 6 steps:

1.  The first step is to understand what manufacturing processes are critical to the business.  Petrochemical facilities achieving high levels of manufacturing excellence generally manage very well the following eight critical manufacturing processes:

• Maintenance systems and practices
• Production and process control
• Process and engineering design
• Planned turnaround management
• Risk management of critical and non-critical plant
• Equipment and process condition monitoring
• Remaining life analysis of aging plant
• Root cause analysis of lost production and failure

It is important for these manufacturing processes to be seamlessly integrated with key management and business processes such as:

• Leadership
• Strategic planning
• Information and analysis
• People management
• Safety, health and environment
• Product quality
• Marketing and sales

2.  The second step is to work with the business to agree on goals and key performance indicators.

3.  The third step is to carry out a gap analysis to establish what shortfalls exist in the current organization. This is completed through an audit-type process, based on manufacturing excellence principles and practices.  Quest Reliability has audit programs to cover all eight critical manufacturing processes.  Examples of audit categories include:

• Pressure equipment management
• Rotating equipment management
• Maintenance systems and practices
• Risk management of critical plant
• Remaining life management of aged plant
• Turnaround management

4.  The fourth step is to shape the shortfall list into a prioritized plan with committed budgets and resources.  Deliverables and responsibilities need to be agreed and documented for all key personnel, to ensure that targets and objectives are met within agreed timescales.

5.  The fifth step concerns measuring and monitoring manufacturing performance.

6.  The sixth step involves a continuous improvement feedback concept.

Plant Reliability Assessment and Audit Recommendations

Quest Reliability often provides reliability assessment and reliability management audit services in the context of a continuing engagement with the customer, where recommendations can be made informally and progress monitored in the course of periodic visits to the plant.  Alternately, audits performed on a one-off or long-interval basis may be documented in a formal report containing prioritized action items and performance measures.  In either case, the customer is also advised on the following value drivers:

Critical Manufacturing Systems.  Manufacturing systems are simply the tools used to manage a particular manufacturing process, such as a computerized maintenance management system as an aid to the maintenance process.  Like all tools, the right one needs to be employed for the right job in the correct manner by an appropriately skilled person(s).

Critical Hardware Management.  Effective management of critical hardware (plant equipment) occurs through effective management of critical manufacturing processes which are supported by effective manufacturing systems.

Plant Reliability Assessment.  Implementation of effective processes and systems delivers long term reliability improvement which should remain durable and robust through the plant’s life cycle.  Material returns on investment (desired outputs such as an increase in asset utilization) may take time to realize.  An additional tool for providing faster returns on investment and which Quest Reliability has utilized on several petrochemical facilities, is the development of a ‘Plant Reliability Assessment’ spreadsheet.  Use of this spreadsheet assures that reliability issues will be addressed while the longer term management practices are being embedded.  This assessment spreadsheet encompasses:

• All the known/potential plant problems.
• Failure modes and effects analysis
• Risk factoring process
• Prioritised action plan
• Resource and budgetary planning

Benefits

The benefits from developing and implementing an advanced manufacturing reliability program are many, but the primary benefits are:

• Improved asset utilisation
• Improved efficiency
• Lower per ton  production costs
• Improved safety, health and environment performance