Objectives
To enable the monitoring and review of all maintenance processes worldwide, a Maintenance Strategy Alignment Tool (M-SAT) was developed by T&OE in partnership with sub-contractors. The challenge was to collect maintenance management data from separate operational units and develop a relational database to analyse it. A comprehensive review would then be executed with the output results being used as the basis for recommendations in maintenance process improvement. Further to this the sub-contractor was obliged to provide maintenance consultancy support to aid and enable implementation of improvements and recommendations.
Implementation
Having worked previously with Latent Ltd Personnel on other projects, Shell T&OE partnered with Latent Ltd on its M-SAT project for the Brunei region. Latent kicked off the project by developing a sample data set and used this as a template to request the correct maintenance management system (MMS) download data from the Brunei Region.
A database package was then developed in-house by Latent, which allowed full manipulation and review of all the SAP MMS data with a minimum of human intervention, eradicating the risk of human induced data quality errors.
The database package enables high-level review over five key maintenance management areas, namely: Function Location, Equipment Class, Maintenance Activity Type Code, Work Discipline Code and Maintenance Priority Category.
Maintenance Plans and Task List entries were collected and validated by Latent prior to being imported into the database package. The software then created cross-asset and cross-region views of current maintenance activity, indicating task frequency and code allocations for each planned maintenance activity. The output reports enabled high-level review of each asset in the region’s annualised effort for all the individual maintenance strategies in operation.
The results were returned to Brunei and T&OE, along with the localised Shell personnel, are using them to review and improve maintenance performance and planning in the region.
Results
Latent were able to highlight the key performance areas to T&OE in which there was potential to improve maintenance expenditure by enhancing maintenance management techniques.
Analysis of the data revealed that although Shell Brunei had good quality maintenance reporting techniques, these were not being fully utilised.
- Latent’s main recommendations were:
- Standardisation of classification procedures/codes and abbreviations across the entire region
- Classification codes in the region are not been fully utilised. In many cases there may be ten or more codes but only two or three actually being used for booking maintenance too.
- Utilisation of a priority categorisation system to prioritise maintenance planning and execution.
- Review of task frequency nesting. Nested Routines made initial analysis complex as nesting wasn’t universally applied across the region
- To ensure contractors are filling in work hours for every job completed.
Although the complete review in Brunei is not yet complete, utilisation of the M-Sat process by T&OE in other Shell Regions has provided on average saving of 20% plus in maintenance budgets, and it is expected that the final results from Brunei will yield similar savings and benefits.
Future
The results of the project will enable T&OE to start an iterative process of aligning the Brunei maintenance strategies, improving system availability and reducing corrective maintenance across the region. It is envisaged that the M-SAT process may be executed again in the future as a second stage review and improve exercise.
