Alesol Equipment provides reliability and maintenance consulting services to small, mid-sized and large companies in different market sectors.
We work in a wide range of process industries in Agriculture, Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals, Energy, mining, oil and gas, pulp and paper, steel and metals, cement, food & beverages etc. But also in manufacturing and facilities.
Our mission is to improve overall reliability and minimize total production cost.
Reliability and Maintenance Implementation Support
Our management consultants provide training and support that consists of:
- I. Preventive Maintenance.
Alesol's Unique Implementation Program covers all the basics of preventive maintenance. We know from very long experience that basic inspections done by maintenance crafts people and operators covers the majority of all components in a plant, yet this part of preventive maintenance is very often overlooked. Implementation of a basic preventive maintenance system yields very good results, as it requires almost no investment in expensive tools and experts.
- II. Planning and Scheduling
Planning decides what, how and time estimate for a job. Scheduling decides when and who will do the job. Planning of a job should be done before Scheduling a job.
A common implementation initiative after a maintenance assessment is maintenance planning and scheduling.
Alesol can help your organization with:
- Customized or standard on-site classroom training in planning and scheduling
- Coaching and implementation support to improve planning and scheduling on-site
Maintenance Planning and scheduling of work orders is the hub of a well-functioning maintenance organization. In order for maintenance planning and scheduling to work many other systems need to work well. Most importantly equipment inspections through preventive maintenance, technical database such as bill of materials, work order history, and standard job plans. Maintenance spare part stores have to function well.
- III. Spare Parts Management
Reliability Based Spare Parts and Materials Management Implementation
Implementation support in Reliability Based Spare Parts and Materials Management builds on the idea that Alesol will transfer knowledge and work procedures to your employees as accurately and quickly as possible. Alesol can coach your team in how to have the right parts, at the right quality and quantity on hand.
Reliability Based Spare Parts and Materials Management Implementation in our projects, we have extracted best practices in spare parts and material management and collected pertinent information to improve implementation speed and quality. For example, we have created business processes for purchasing related to maintenance storeroom, receiving in maintenance storeroom, Bill of Materials, Economic Order Quantities (EOQ), and much more. We have also designed a process for defining roles and responsibilities for each employee involved in the maintenance storeroom.
Our consultants will be able to lead your improvement process by using his/her experience together with experience from successful projects in the past.
- IV. Root Cause Analysis (RCA)
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) indicates that the desired outcome is to analyze the root cause of a failure. The desired outcome should either be to mitigate, rectify or eliminate the problem.
The basic concept of any problem solving method is to use a number of structured steps to arrive accurately at the true source of the problem in order to eliminate it to avoid recurring of the issue. Alesol's consulting and training focuses on what we believe most plants need:
- A simplified, structured, practical approach to eliminating problems for the frontline (hourly & first line supervision), to enable root cause analysis and elimination of problem on the plant floor.
- Training and support for facilitators when going through root cause analysis and problem solving sessions
- Support to implement a complete root cause problem elimination business process for the plant.
We see that 80-90% of all problems can be eliminated by training and implementing basic problem solving methods for the frontline organization (operators, craftspeople, planners and first line supervision). The remaining 10-20% of the problems that are harder to solve should go through more structured problem solving where more people are involved. The second level of problem solving requires facilitator support.
Apart from Trainings Alesol helps in embedding the RCFA Process in your organization to be sustainable. This process includes:
- How to record problems.
- How to select problems to be analyzed.
- What triggers are to be used
- How to document solutions.
- How to share results within your plant and between several plants.
- Use results for autonomous training.
- V. Maintenance Audit/Maintenance Assessment
Strategy, Maintenance Assessment & Improvement Plans
Together with process industry Alesol has developed a reliability and maintenance audit and benchmarking process based on best practices in industry. The best practices have been defined over the years as we have worked with many organizations at different geographies. We call our reliability and maintenance audit process "Current Best Practices" (CBP) since best practices may change over time. Many companies have used our CBP strategy and auditing model. They are very well verified and tested by many different types of users.
About the Assessment Documentation
The current best practices for reliability and maintenance include around 200 statement(s) describing the RIGHT THINGS TO DO in order to improve reliability and drive down costs. These statements cover the following categories:
- Leadership and organization.
- Preventive Maintenance/ essential care and condition monitoring
- Planning and scheduling
- Root cause problem elimination
- Materials management
- Facilities, Tools, and Workshops
- Engineering's interface with Maintenance
- Technical Database
- Skills Development
When we do a reliability and maintenance benchmarking audit, we compare your performance with our CBP. The gaps are identified and scored. Each CBP is scored and commented on in order to document the gap. Each category is scored and the score can be compared to other companies in order to benchmark the reliability and maintenance performance of your organization. However, the gap is primarily used for four things:
- a) Document your Reliability and Maintenance Strategy.
- b) Educate your organization and increase awareness of how good you are compared with how good you can become.
- c) Develop an action plan for implementation of improvements.
- d) Continuously measure progress and results from implementation of your strategy.