Reducing unplanned downtime on an upgraded production line

Situation

Our client, a vertically integrated Russian producer of phosphate fertilisers, was upgrading its production lines to expand the range of fertiliser grades it produced. When the project began, 6 months had passed since the upgrade, but throughput differed significantly from plan. Our team was engaged to accelerate the lines’ ramp-up to target throughput, including by improving maintenance performance.

What we did

• Introduced joint inspection rounds, identifying more than 1,500 defects; the number of defects identified through the mobile inspection application increased 20-fold.
• Increased the number of jobs included in planned preventive maintenance by a factor of 3.3 through better planning.
• Increased the proportion of jobs in the weekly plan drawn from the maintenance management system (Oracle EAM) from approximately 15% to 70%, improving the recording of maintenance work. Previously, jobs had been included in the plan without being recorded in EAM.
• Increased maintenance personnel’s hands-on maintenance time by 15–20% by speeding up work permit processing, improving work control through planned maintenance coordination centres, developing training programmes for specific types of work, establishing an operational reserve and introducing maintenance team chat groups.
• Introduced planned maintenance reviews and developed more than 100 actions to improve planned maintenance performance.
• Developed checklists for key meetings, increasing meeting effectiveness from 40% to more than 80%.

Results

• A 67% reduction in unplanned downtime on the upgraded line.
• A 3.3-fold increase in the number of jobs included in planned preventive maintenance.

Unplanned downtime, % of calendar time

Number of defect rectification jobs during planned maintenance