Pre-Startup Maintenance Strategy for a New Aluminum Facility
Intro:
An industry leading Aluminum Company is building a new rolling facility to produce low carbon, flat rolled aluminum products for beverage, automotive, and industrial markets. The plant will be one of the first new aluminum rolling mills in North America in decades and will rely on highly automated, high dependency equipment to meet production expectations.
Background:
From the outset, leaders at the new facility understood that constructing the plant was only part of the challenge. They also needed to build an organization, define work processes, and create a reliability focused culture that could support long-term performance. The facility follows a lean, entrepreneurial model in which employees are encouraged to “own their business” and make decisions that affect performance within their areas of responsibility.
During construction the company installed advanced automation systems, including a fully automated storage and transport system that links operations. These systems represent critical points in the production flow. If they fail, material movement and throughput are severely hindered. At the same time, the organization was hiring and training staff, designing its organizational structure, configuring its computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), and developing maintenance strategies for their most critical equipment. Because of all these moving parts, leaders wanted a proactive maintenance and reliability strategy in place before startup, rather than relying on reactive work after the plant was up and running.
Issues:
The plant objectives were to:
- Reduce the risk associated with high dependency, single point of failure equipment in a new facility.
- Develop asset hierarchies, risk rankings, and maintenance strategies by utilizing OEM documentation while equipment was still being installed.
- Configure the CMMS with accurate asset master data and maintenance plans before startup.
- Prepare a new workforce to operate and maintain complex automated systems with confidence.
Solution:
LCE partnered with the plant to design and implement pre-startup maintenance and reliability strategies for the most critical assets. The effort began with the creation of asset master data and a detailed equipment hierarchy for systems such as the cranes and high-speed transfer cars. LCE facilitated a criticality assessment that identified the cranes as the highest-risk assets within this system, which allowed the team to focus attention and resources that would have the greatest impact on startup and full production.
The LCE team led a detailed Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), evaluating hundreds of failure scenarios and defining preventive and predictive tasks for each. These tasks were formatted into standardized work orders that could be directly integrated into the company’s CMMS.
To address the challenges of operating automated equipment, LCE recommended and supported the implementation of real-time predictive monitoring technology. This system captured equipment data, allowing the organization to detect early signs of degradation and provide the ability to prevent unplanned failures.
Impact:
By investing in pre-startup maintenance strategy development, the plant created a strong foundation for reliable operations before production began. Key outcomes included:
- Complete asset hierarchies for critical transport and storage systems, which provided information in the CMMS for routine work planning, preventive maintenance and spare parts.
- Risk-based maintenance plans for three cranes and high speed transfer cars, derived from FMEAs that evaluated more than 450 functional failure modes and hundreds of line items.
- Standardized preventive and predictive maintenance job plans, ready for execution in a work order format in the CMMS.
- Implementation of a real time predictive monitoring solution for 112 assets and 560 data sets, improving visibility into the health of critical components.
- Preparation for future work on rolling mill spare parts and materials management.
Although the plant has not yet accumulated long-term performance data, these efforts significantly reduce the risk of early failures, shorten the learning curve, and set expectations for a proactive culture.
Quick Summary:
This major aluminum company partnered with Life Cycle Engineering to prepare a new rolling facility for startup by:
- Building asset hierarchies and risk-based maintenance strategies for critical automated transport systems
- Developing standardized preventive and predictive maintenance plans based on detailed FMEAs
- Implementing real time condition monitoring for more than 100 assets
- Integrating maintenance strategies and asset data into the CMMS before production begins
- Establishing a proactive reliability mindset for a newly formed workforce
Unlock your organization’s potential with world class reliability expertise from Life Cycle Engineering. For more information, email info@LCE.com or visit LCE.com.
