In a recent post, we suggested that with modern maintenance & reliability management, it’s more insightful to focus on backlog trends rather than the traditional 4–6 week KPI target; observing whether the backlog is increasing, decreasing, or steady provides valuable insights. With advanced M&R processes and tools, larger backlogs should be expected. However, if poorly managed, they can lead to issues such as high break-in rates, reduced reliability, lower availability, and increased costs. When managed effectively, larger backlogs offer leaders a clearer view of plant health, enabling more strategic decision-making, optimized downtime, and improved resource allocation, leading to stronger performance metrics.
Effectively managing backlog requires the consistent, disciplined application of foundational maintenance and reliability (M&R) practices, such as:
• Asset Criticality – Identify the critical assets essential to your operation.
• Due date – Use data to estimate the timeline before a defect escalates into failure. When data is limited, leverage personnel expertise, recognizing their tendency toward conservative estimates.
• Risk assessment – Apply a standardized approach to evaluate the potential severity and likelihood of failure if the defect isn’t promptly addressed.
• Prioritization – Organize the backlog into manageable work blocks using a corrective prioritization system (ideally 3-5 categories). Each priority level combines asset criticality, due date, and risk assessment, with high-criticality, high-risk issues that may fail imminently given top priority.
• Mitigation and monitoring – For high priority work orders that cannot be completed by the due date, identify temporary mitigation strategies, whether it’s a temporary repair or establishing a monitoring program (e.g. increased oil sampling frequency, crack measurement, etc).
• Remote condition monitoring – Consider adding monitoring systems if infrastructure supports it, (eg. strain gauges or thermocouples) to track defect progression in real time.
• Plan the repair – Begin planning the repair as early as possible to secure long-lead materials or services. Be prepared for re-planning aged work orders to adjust to field conditions
• Schedule the repair – High priority repairs should become the driver for the schedule; this ensures the critical work remains visible and will be completed prior to the due date.
• Backlog monitoring – Periodically review priorities and risks of each order and purge all obsolete or completed work
A major risk with backlog, regardless of size, is that newly identified work can repeatedly displace scheduled work, inevitably leading to untimely costly breakdowns. Applying foundational M&R practices can turn backlog into a proactive tool to reduce breakdowns, control costs and boost facility performance.
Weathering Commodity Fluctuations in Mining
September 10, 2024
No Comments
