Saving thousands of industrial maintenance work hours per year

Industrial Maintenance - Success Story

In the utilities sector, industrial maintenance management is key, and delays in repair have expensive and time-consuming consequences. By conducting a full process review, the pilot power plant of this international group has saved the equivalent of 3 full weeks of site closure.

Context

Utilities industry is compelled to evolve faster than ever before. For a business sector used to manage very long-term business models, the transformation journey groups has to face is unprecedent. Our client, a utilities international leader, is embracing the change at high speed, supporting the global energy transition movement, and analyzing its own performance.

In this internal performance transformation strategy, the Group’s Management team has proposed business units and plants to share their ideas and experience of performance enhancement. Among other projects, industrial maintenance processes management has been highlighted and is being rethought.

Industrial Maintenance Process

Industrial maintenance, a key asset of the utilities industry

“Everyone tends to think that maintenance services in the Utilities relate to the operations our teams do at our customers premises and in the countryside, on a day-to-day basis or in emergency situations such as storms. Those are just the tip of the iceberg; industrial maintenance is one of the key assets of all our business”, comments the Client’s project lead. Indeed, within any Utilities power plant, installation maintenance is essential for production performance. Maintenance response time is also crucial, as for safety and security reasons the plant can be partially or completely shut down during the entire repair period!

To better analyze the maintenance services process, decision has been made to use as a pilot one of the group’s power plants. The project focused on the way the services were managed, with the strong support of the concerned teams: applicants, principals and plant management, maintenance teams, external providers.

A collaborative analysis of the ticketing process

“As a starting point, we used the processes the plant had already implemented for the management of its industrial maintenance needs”, comments François Arnaud, Livejourney’s Co-Founder. “Our solution is able to interface to any IT solution. This helped provide a very quick picture of the situation to the project team”. This implementation approach had three advantages:

The quite-immediate launch of the process mining project

A factual and visual data delivery

An equal information sharing for all teams concerned by the industrial maintenance process management

The Process Intelligence solution allowed the client’ teams to consider each of the processes: compliant ones, variants, bottlenecked, … and discuss deadlines, workflows, incidents, maintenance prioritization types, team management, external partners contracting, and… delays effective costs.

The initial process mining analysis has allowed the implementation of a first set of KPIs, which brought a series of adjustments that had an immediate and positive impact:

  • On the work organization and
  • On the Power Plant teams’ satisfaction.

After one year, the outcomes include a tremendous reduction of the plant shutdown (+3 full weeks equivalent), a new allocation of the industrial maintenance resources and a success increase (+20%) for the first-level repairs.

Key figures

0 %
of non-compliant processes
detected and adjusted
0
full-weeks plant work saved
+ 0 %
of productivity