Is your project ready for operations when you want to start up? Can you commission and start up with ease and expect to reach full and steady production quickly? Or is your experience with project start ups more chaotic?
Chaos is natural
Conceptually, entropy is a scientific measure that represents that natural state of everything – chaos. The more chaotic things are, the more entropy they have. We tend to prefer things orderly and predictable. To achieve that we add energy, but without it, we will have chaos. If start ups after a capital project are chaotic, it means you have missed something. Think of it as not having enough energy. That energy is fore-thought and preparation. With it, your project is ready for operations.
Most projects
Is your project ready for operations? Most are not. Once handover to operations occurs, chaos emerges. Often there is unfinished construction and installation work. Maintenance may be able to fix it, but it adds a lot of strain to a group that is already stretched thin. If operators are not well trained in the new systems, they’ll make mistakes, some will cause equipment failure. You may have start-up spares, but they are never enough. Those spares usually serve only to meet the needs of manufacturer recommended preventive maintenance. That recommended maintenance is often inappropriate for your operational context. The end result is a rocky start up, slow ramp up, and often-times, an inability to meet the project’s stated output goals. ROI (actual) is often far less than the ROI forecast.
If you want smooth, reliable, predictable operations, you need to do the right maintenance, the right way, and at the right times. You can read more about that in these few articles about “entropy” and maintenance.
It doesn’t need to be that way! Avoiding Chaos
If you have everything your operators and maintainers will need to start up, run, achieve target performance levels, and maintain the new systems, you are ready. The airlines achieve it because the aircraft manufacturers do a lot of thinking about operational and maintenance needs, and put them in place so that the first flight with paying customers is reliable and safe. The military regularly puts new technology into the field in its weapon systems and it usually works very well.
Aircraft manufacturers, airlines, and the military all use similar approaches to Operational Readiness. The cost of doing that is usually no more than 5% of the capital cost of the project and the work is performed during the design and build phases of the asset life cycle. The operators are trained so that when they take over the new system, they know what they are doing. The maintenance program is designed scientifically for the operating environment, and all the tooling, spares, etc. that will be needed, are in place.
That same approach can be used anywhere. It’s not “gold plating” or excessive spending of capital. In fact, it will easily pay for itself within the first year of operations.
Payback on Operational Readiness
Benchmark maintenance costs are in the range of 3 – 9% of asset replacement costs every year. A chaotic operation will have a lot of breakdowns, and unplanned work. It will easily cost 3 times what an equivalent reliable operation would cost, just to maintain. If you can keep your maintenance costs in the low end of that benchmark range with operational readiness, you’ve paid for that investment in year one.
Consider that the operation will also ramp up to full production levels quickly. Instead of taking months to get running smoothly, you’ll be up in weeks. When breakdowns do occur, you can repair them quickly with the spares and skills you have on hand. We find that reliable operations are not only less expensive to maintain, the maintenance cost savings are often only a tenth of the value of the revenue earned from reliable operation with little variation.
