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Finding the Needles in the Haystack


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Finding the Needles in the Haystack

In my last post I talked about how you can leverage your maintenance information to support your capital renewal planning.  This entire series of posts was inspired by the increased number of clients that are considering Equipment Inventory & Tagging (EI&T) as part of their Integrated Asset Management (IAM) programs.

One of the challenges about integrating O&M data into a capital planning process is that not all work orders are relevant to a Facility Condition Assessment (FCA).  Leaky faucets, temperature complaints, etc. are just “noise” when it comes to capital renewal planning.  The problem is that the irrelevant work orders often far outnumber the ones that contain important information.

I have been involved in many projects where a client shares work order history with us as part of our background information.  There are usually two big challenges.  The first is that work orders are not associated with a specific piece of equipment (see my last post for the issues this causes).  The second is that there are so many work orders that have little or no impact on deciding when to study, repair or replace a piece of equipment.  

These two issues together create a bit of a needle in a haystack scenario.  Somewhere in the giant stack of data we know there is valuable information.  However, no client is going to want to pay us for the time that it will take to dig through and find the valuable nuggets amongst all the irrelevant information.  

So, how can you make the important data rise to the top of the pile so it is easy to find and digest.  Regarding the lifespan of a piece of equipment, you must differentiate between what is important and what isn’t,  so that it is easy for those doing your FCAs to quickly and easily understand what is going on with a specific piece of equipment.

The approach that we recommend (although I am sure there are other ways) is to categorize your work orders within your Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS).  We use “Capital Relevant” as the category that we recommend clients create so that work orders that are based on Preventative Maintenance (PM) activities, major failures, parts replacement, etc. are all bundled together into a category, while all other minor work orders are separated (Capital Irrelevant).  

It doesn’t really matter what you call them, you just have to be able to sort them and only share the relevant ones with your FCA provider or team. 

The maintenance history of a piece of equipment plays an important role in determining if/when a piece of equipment needs to be replaced.  However, if that data is not readily accessible it will often be ignored, causing your assessment team to lean more on age-based planning, which at the end of the day is just math! 

I would love to hear other stories about how your organization has found the needles in your haystacks.  If you have another approach to solving this problem, please share it with us!

Next week I will focus on the importance of tagging equipment during your inventory projects.  


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