Executive summary
This report describes an investigation on the implementation of maintenance engineering within the working units of Corus IJmuiden. The aim of the implementation of maintenance engineering is to optimize the shift from corrective maintenance towards preventive maintenance of the production-installations at Corus IJmuiden and thus to be able to find a better balance between these two. The results of this will, amongst others, lead to an increase of the installation availability and reliability.
Background
The background of this investigation highlights the attempts made by all maintenance employees of all the work units to perform maintenance on the production-installations according to standardized maintenance engineering processes. The main question of this research is:
In what way could maintenance engineering processes be organized that they optimize their contribution to the performance improvement of the production installations of Corus IJmuiden?
From an earlier preliminary investigation, it appeared that there are two main problems at the maintenance departments within the work units:
- The maintenance processes are very well documentated, but not recognized by the people that need to work with them. So these processes will not be used. - Maintenance engineers are not being recognized as long term developers of
the production-installations.
The “Corus IJmuiden Maintenance engineering” survey
The results of the questionnaire indicate that the respondents think that maintenance engineering is not implemented enough within the working units. The following aspects of process definition are still missing:
- Not enough clarity about the function and tasks of a maintenance engineer - Not a clear image on which competences en characteristics are needed so the
maintenance engineer will optimally perform
- There aren’t any KPI’s to measure the maintenance engineering performance - There isn’t any learning program is place for maintenance engineers
- Within the working units there isn’t enough knowledge about maintenance concepts to make them succeed
Next to these five aspects it can be noted that the social-dynamic side of the ‘change process’ has been neglected. This has caused the motivation and commitment of the people involved to be lower than necessary for the successful implementation of maintenance engineering.
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The solution
Until now the implementation of maintenance engineering within Corus IJmuiden has been considered to be one main project, the management focus being primarily aimed at the development of new maintenance plans and the fault reduction process. Other aspects of the implementation, i.e. changing the work strategy at the maintenance department and the development of a continuous improved work strategy has been under exposed. In order to make sure this will improve in the future, the following points should be improved:
- Maintenance engineers need to get a learning path
- The right knowledge for the right people within the organization
- Support from outside the work units, so the organization will be kept on their toes(Corus maintenance centre of knowledge for work units)
In this report a couple of important attention points between the IST situation and the SOLL situation can be marked. These aspects need to be in order before the maintenance engineering processes can be optimized.
Conclusion
To make sure that the maintenance engineering processes can be optimized make sure that the following points will be embedded into the organization:
- Maintenance strategy needs to be known throughout the whole organization - Knowledge about maintenance engineering within the whole organization - Late the maintenance engineer do only the tasks coming out of the processes - The maintenance engineer needs to have adequate support from Senior ME
and external body.
- Make sure the time path is very clear when improvement projects are started Recommendations
Next to the recommendations in the solution chapter:
- Steps that need to be taken for optimization of maintenance engineering
- Make sure that there is enough support from the operators to implement maintenance concepts and the new working strategy
- For extra motivation quick results are necessary, not only the results on the long term.
- Make sure that the organization structure is very well implemented
