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    Simplifying Mining Maintenance: A Practical Guide to Building a Culture That Prevents Breakdowns and Increases Profits
    Simplifying Mining Maintenance: A Practical Guide to Building a Culture That Prevents Breakdowns and Increases Profits
    Simplifying Mining Maintenance: A Practical Guide to Building a Culture That Prevents Breakdowns and Increases Profits
    Ebook154 pages1 hour

    Simplifying Mining Maintenance: A Practical Guide to Building a Culture That Prevents Breakdowns and Increases Profits

    By Gerard Wood

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    In the world of mining, both mining and asset management professionals often face difficult challenges to improve plant and fleet reliability or cost. Over the years the mining industry has developed complicated systems and processes to deal with the seemingly complex problems, but in the real world of maintenance, to be truly effective, organizations must first embed the practical, culture-based routines that simplify work so that large groups of people can align and become effective.

    After more than thirty years in mining, Gerard Wood has experienced firsthand the persistent maintenance problems that can occur. Throughout these years he has developed effective methods for solving the common problems by developing the required culture of ownership and care that will ensure reliable, low-cost equipment performance. In Simplifying Mining Maintenance, he presents two simple models for reliable maintenance management, as well as actionable solutions to common problems causing unscheduled downtime events, increased scheduled downtime, cost concerns, people problems, and poor transition from projects to operations.

    Having the best maintenance organization in the world is possible--by getting back to basics with simple, culture-focused routines that people can understand and implement to ensure sustainable equipment performance.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateNov 29, 2018
    ISBN9781544512549
    Simplifying Mining Maintenance: A Practical Guide to Building a Culture That Prevents Breakdowns and Increases Profits

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    Reviews for Simplifying Mining Maintenance

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    • 5/5
      Good read, enjoyed this book. One of the few books with a simple and practical approach.

    Book preview

    Simplifying Mining Maintenance - Gerard Wood

    ]>

    ]>

    Copyright © 2018 Gerard Wood

    All rights reserved.

    ISBN: 978-1-5445-1254-9

    ]>

    I would like to dedicate this book to my late uncle Gordon Wood, who lost his life on a mine site where I worked at the time. His death is always a reminder of the hazards that we must look out for and control every day in mining, and why it is necessary to take the management of safety so seriously.

    ]>

    Contents

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction

    Part I: An Asset Management Journey

    1. Experiencing All Roles

    2. Even More Models

    3. Focusing on the Major Pain Points

    Part II: Common Problems and Practical Solutions

    4. Excessive Unscheduled and Reactive Downtime

    5. Excessive Scheduled Downtime

    6. Budget Overruns and Cost Concerns

    7. People Problems

    8. Project Transition to Operations

    About the Author

    ]>

    Acknowledgments

    I would like to acknowledge all of the people whom I have worked with over my career. This book is really a compilation of the experiences and learning that I have taken from working with so many talented people over the past thirty-four years.

    ]>

    Introduction

    My 360-Degree Journey

    I started my career on the workshop floor in the mid-1980s, maintaining equipment as a tradesperson. In Australia, where I live and work, we call these folks tradies—and I always enjoyed being one. I took a lot of pride in my work, and I felt responsible for keeping my machines running reliably without any unexpected breakdowns. You never wanted to come into work and learn from the night shift that one of your machines had broken down. That made you feel terrible, so you did everything you could to prevent that from happening. I did not want to be the guy who caused problems for the other shifts. No one did. It made you feel like you’d let a coworker down.

    Over the next fifteen years, I moved up from the shop floor into a supervisory role, then into planning, engineering, and maintenance management roles. While working full time in the mines and growing my wonderful family, I studied electrical engineering, mining engineering, and business administration.

    Eventually, I moved into a central maintenance role, and my job was to help many different mining sites along the east coast of Australia and other parts of the globe improve their maintenance efforts. I was on a team—Global Maintenance Network (GMN)—that worked with the local mines to improve the reliability of their machines, which exposed me to models, theories, and frameworks for equipment maintenance, reliability, and asset management. We used to joke that in the GMN we had more models than a hobby shop. All of these models were flawed, but some were useful. We mapped workflow processes, conducted maintenance evaluations, did Six Sigma process improvement, and conducted root-cause analysis, among many other improvement initiatives.

    But even after several years of this, I didn’t see much improvement in the reliability of the mining machinery. We rolled out models, trained staff, taught theories, and invested in computer maintenance management equipment, but we never saw the results we should have. The equipment should have grown increasingly reliable, but it didn’t. Of course, there were pockets of improvement, but generally speaking, there was no companywide consistent improvement in equipment performance.

    I realised after some time that we had overcomplicated the process of maintenance so much that the fundamental value of putting a person with the right level of ownership to work on the machines—a machine the mechanic knows personally and has worked on extensively already—had been lost. Processes and systems are essential, especially in large businesses, but without the basics of the work being executed well, all of the benefits from the processes and systems are lost. With this realisation, my approach to maintenance had come full circle. I began thinking again like a tradesman, with the understanding that caring for the equipment and maintaining it in good condition was the best way to prevent failures.

    I have since worked extensively with companies to rebuild that culture of ownership and quality and instil confidence that maintenance can make a difference. These companies have achieved great results in a short time.

    This success inspired me to take on the daunting task of writing this book. My goal in writing it is to make that culture of ownership and quality maintenance commonplace in our industry. I want the mining industry to be seen as leaders in asset management and equipment reliability. I want to remind people how important craftsmanship is and show them how they can incorporate it back into even the most complex maintenance strategies. I want this book to bring the focus back to the basics.

    A Cautionary Tale

    When it comes to mining, equipment maintenance is not an option or a luxury. The work is too hard on the machines. When you are using equipment to haul tons of ore or bore into bedrock for hours a day, proper preventive and proactive maintenance is a necessity.

    Many mining companies have spent millions and sometimes billions of dollars to improve maintenance systems and equipment reliability only to discover little return. Senior managers continue to complain about equipment reliability and maintenance costs.

    It doesn’t have to be this way. This book is not meant to be a detailed manual on how to technically implement all these little systems to treat the symptoms. Instead, the book’s goal is to help people in the mining industry agree on the importance of maintenance. I’m not advocating a technical approach. In fact, I recommend keeping things simple. Schedule the required maintenance downtime and do the work when you’re supposed to. Give people the time and tools they need and let them prevent problems rather than simply attacking them when they crop up.

    You don’t need to read this book sequentially; simply read the appropriate chapters when you need ideas for dealing with your problems. If you have difficulties with only handover to operations, then skip to that chapter. If you spend too much on maintenance, read the section on cost problems. Focus on the areas where you are struggling. Use this book as a guide. It is not a 100 percent solution, but it will offer ideas for practical results. The methods I recommend will free you from the mountains of checklists and procedures that tie up their mechanics and administrators and keep them from more important work.

    I want mining maintenance people to believe they can be the best-performing maintenance teams in the world. I want them to believe in their value and to rekindle their passion for improvement. I want people to simplify complicated processes and documentation. I want to make it easier for people to get their work done and hold one another accountable. I also want to give them the tools, space, and consistency they need to rediscover a sense of pride and ownership in their work. That pride and workmanship is what keeps equipment running and makes a mine successful. I want to encourage that culture.

    People Who Influenced Me

    My ideas on simplifying and improving mining equipment maintenance have been influenced by a number of leaders in the mining industry. I have learned from everyone I have worked with over the past thirty-three years, and many of these people gave me critical insights into simplifying and improving the industry.

    When I worked for BHP and was in the GMN, we purchased a company called Western Mining Corporation. A guy named Dick Pettigrew was their head of reliability. While those of us in the GMN focused on evaluations, fluid cleanliness, root-cause analysis, and defect elimination, Dick concentrated on a whole-of-business approach to reliability improvement. Dick considered reliability-centred maintenance (RCM) as the fundamental framework for building reliability. Dick came from the petrochemical industry, and even though RCM hadn’t been very successful in the mining industry, Dick showed me that RCM could help solve

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