The White Elephant on the Plant Shop Floor

 

A decade back we were conducting a Technical cum Operational Review of Plant Maintenance on the Shop Floor for a fully integrated upstream petroleum Company.

 

At the start of the review we were both surprised and excited to identify specific Machine Centre's experiencing unscheduled and unanticipated Breakdown Maintenance, even though those Machine Centre's were a regular part of the Preventive Maintenance line up for over 5-10 years of working existence.

 

Our discussions with Technical Plant Supervisors led us to a dead end on this erratic behaviour (outage) of the Machine Centre's.

 

Anything baffling and exciting as such - could have answers in insights gleaned through intelligent Data Analytics.

 

In comes our guide "IDEA". 

 

We decided as part of the Data Discovery phase, that we would indent the Fixed Asset (Machine Centre) data file having Asset Acquisition Costs and the Machine Maintenance Expenditure data file - both for the last 10 years.

 

By applying a straight Compare in IDEA on Machine Centre Code (Unique Asset Tag Number for Machines) we were able to summarize and compare (match) the Total Maintenance Expenditure Machine wise versus the Buy Cost of the same Machine Centre. Then using a quick extraction we pulled out cases of accumulated Machine Maintenance Cost exceeding on the Acquisition Cost of the Machines in a few instances.

 

Lo and behold this insight confirmed the behaviour of Machine Centre's under review - they have outlived their useful working life - the White Elephant on the Plant Shop Floor.

 

Best Regards

 

Group Admin Team