06.5.2013
Industries are increasingly paying attention to maintenance efficiency optimizing the level
in reliability and availability of assets. Many of the improvements could be obtained using
new technologies and strategies to maximize service level and to reduce the maintenance
costs, as long as it is possible to identify the business areas where a leap in technology
could render and optimize the maintenance processes.
Aitor Arnaiz
IK4-Tekniker
Mantenimiento y Fiabilidad
aitor.arnaiz@tekniker.es
Egoitz Conde
IK4-Tekniker
Mantenimiento y Fiabilidad
egoitz.conde@tekniker.es
Xabier Sagartzazu
IK4-Ikerlan
Ingeniería Mecánica
xabier.xagartzazu@ikerlan.es
One of Europe’s large elevator companies, ORONA, is an example on this trend. In their
search for service excellence, starting from an optimal level in reliability and availability,
ORONA, together with IK4, has worked in the development of a continuous improvement
cycle, which is able to consider the quality of service as well as the maintenance efficiency
in a coherent way.
The decission process, which has been in use in ORONA since 2009, is using common
techniques and standards, together with a specific module developed for evaluation of
different strategies, keeping always in mind the possibility to implement new
technologies related to predictive maintenance.
Introduction
Performance improvements in the maintenance and conservation activities of assets are
measured by availability and operational reliability. They should be obtained preserving
maximum quality and safety levels and minimizing the costs.
In the current scenario of competitiveness, improvement efforts are essential to reach
high levels of effectiveness and efficiency in every company’s production or operational
department. The purpose is to achieve competitive advantage (in products or offered
services) based on different hard-to-copy aspects, i.e. know-how.
To obtain maximum performance, the organizations must be prepared for changes and
there are three interconnected areas in the change concept [1]:
Processes, work fluxes to achieve the improvements (e.g. doing more preventive
work instead of corrective work, etc.).
Technologies to facilitate or enable some processes.
Organization and people within the organization must validate any change, so
there is a need of tools to ease changes.
Figure 6. Inspection strategy with different frequencies shows how decreasing the
inspection frequency is not the right approach because it could produce savings, but there
will be a cost in quality of service (failures).
Outcomes of the information Improvement
The outcomes of the project are not only related to the identification of ‘hot spots’ where
to apply new technologies and strategies. The continuous improvement had also an
important impact in the quality of theinformation that is handled by ORONA services.
A new optimized visit report has been designed, both in manual and electronic versions.
The main goal is to reduce the amount of incidences not yet linked with a clear type of
failure. Vaguely defined fields of the work order were erased (“Other” type of failures)
and now there are three codes to be filled in: failure code, cause code and made action
code. Codes with little impact in the indicators were eliminated to have a manageable
work order for the maintenance staff.
First available results showed a great improvement of the identification of failures with
the three codes: failure/cause/action, there is now a clear identification of the failures
which is essential for suggesting improvements and speeding up work order fulfilment
(less notes are needed in the work order).
During the first steps of the project there was only one indicator related to the reliability
of the product. During the project development new indicators were discovered and
selected as the need to consider other lift costs and quality of service related aspects
became evident. Currently there are four indicators to identify the impact of the potential
improvements in maintenance.
The need of better information quality enabled identifying improvement points for
infrastructures associated to information access, transmission and processing. These
improvements are being handled by different groups in the company.