Peter Willmott will be speaking at the Marcus Evans annual flagship Total Plant Maintenance event which is taking place between the 18th and 20th May in Dubai, where they feature key industry experts regionally and internationally to share their insights on latest AIM strategies.
Ahead of this Total Plant Maintenance conference, Marcus Evans spoke with Peter on the challenges, benefits and strategies of Total Plant Maintenance. He will be facilitating the workshop on Total Productive Maintenance on the third day. They asked Peter what are the challenges plant management usually face when it comes to Total Productive Maintenance, and what are the solutions to these challenges?
The Top 6 challenges faced by the Plant Management Leadership Team are:
- Lack of Clear, Consistent Leadership and Direction
- Lack of thorough front-end Planning and Preparation, followed up with regular Measurement and Feedback
- Unclear Roles / Responsibilities / Accountabilities
- The TPM Change Programme has no Clear Vision
- Lack of a thorough Risk Assessment & Countermeasure Definition
- Poor Communication
The solution to these challenges is to address each of the above 6 issues at the frontend Senior Management ‘Buy-in workshop and the Scoping / Planning study
The other major challenge to be addressed is the commonly held perception that ‘TPM is really just a ‘hidden agenda’ to get Operators to do the Maintainer’s Job’?
The response to this challenge is to understand that the whole philosophy around TPM centres on teamwork between the Operator of the Equipment and the Maintenance Technician for taking shared responsibility for the health and reliability of their equipment assets.
So we need to view and consider both roles together in order to define who does what—and hence the why, when and how?
I encourage the analogy that healthy equipment is just like a healthy body. In this scenario the Operator is the Nurse of the Asset (the patient) and the Technician is the Doctor (and occasionally the Surgeon in an emergency).
