Transforming Asset Performance with the LCEsmartr Playbook and Reliability Excellence
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Introduction
One of the world’s largest cane sugar refiners and marketers faced significant challenges in optimizing plant performance and reducing maintenance costs across its six US and three European refineries. With a dedicated workforce of 3,000 employees, they aimed to enhance production consistency while fostering a culture of ownership and engagement.
Background
Recognizing the need to standardize work and improve their equipment performance, the company sought the expertise of Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) to implement best practices in reliability and asset management. With a focus on establishing a proactive workforce and improving manufacturing efficiency, they initiated a comprehensive program leveraging LCE’s subject matter experts and LCEsmartr – LCE’s proprietary online reliability program management system.
Issues
The company wanted to:
- Ensure consistent business and work processes across a multi-plant global organization
- Ensure most effective, efficient best practice adoption across the global organization
- Prioritize implementation sequence to ensure optimum return on investment
- Minimize time and level of effort required to complete the multi-site transformation
- Optimize asset performance and reduce maintenance costs
- Cultivate an engaged workforce that embraces reliability best practices
- Ensure consistent production performance to meet market demands
Action
To address these challenges, Life Cycle Engineering embarked on a business process re-engineering transformation using LCE’s Reliability Excellence methodology. To speed time to results, LCE consultants and client team members used the reliability training, program tools, and templates in the LCEsmartr Playbook. In addition, the organizational change management tools in LCEsmartr showed leaders how to champion a reliability transformation to encourage adoption of the new processes and program sustainability. The online reliability training available in LCEsmartr enabled quick and effective new employee onboarding, skill-building, and ongoing personnel development in critical asset management functions, like:
- Maintenance planning and scheduling
- Reliability engineering
- Storeroom management
The company’s Reliability Excellence transformation efforts included five sites and 48 users, eight of which were leaders. Central to the work completed at the sites included customizing standard metrics and standard work packages in reliability engineering, storeroom management, and maintenance planning and scheduling. These packages included responsibility matrixes and manager coaching cards to standardize operations across the company, speed adoption of the new “way” of working, and increase competency in maintenance and reliability best practices. The LCEsmartr Playbook saw impressive engagement, with an average of 21 logins per month (over 250 visits a year) with users accessing resources in all work streams.
Impact
By leveraging the standard work packages and online training across five sites, this large refiner achieved Reliability Excellence in 1/3 of the time compared to traditional methods. Other results included:
- Targeted increased availability to 96.9% and first pass quality rate of 99%
- Improved Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), with an estimated average of 3% increase over five sites, equaling $4.2M in returns
- Development of risk-based asset maintenance plans that deferred capital expenditures while ensuring customer order fulfillment
- Five sites used online training and standard work from the LCEsmartr Playbook, combined with LCE’s expert consulting , to accelerate their Reliability Excellence initiative and to achieve results in 1/3 of the time of traditional business process re-engineering projects.
- By using the reliability engineering, RCA, and loss elimination tools in LCEsmartr, the company has targeted the following improvements:
- Increased availability to 96.9%
- First pass quality rate of 99%
- Improved Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), with an estimated average of 3% increase over five sites, equaling $4.2M in returns
- The company’s sites are building risk-based asset maintenance plans with FMEA and EMP tools in LCEsmartr to share across facilities to encourage CapEx deferral and to meet customer orders and market demand.
- Over a three-year period from the inception of their Reliability Excellence program implementation, the company expects to achieve approximately $18,700,000 USD in savings with cash break-even occurring within the first year of the program.
Conclusion
Through LCE’s guidance, the adoption of reliability best practices, and by leveraging the LCEsmartr Playbook, this cane sugar refiner transformed its asset management strategy. The initiative not only resulted in significant cost savings but also empowered employees, leading to a sustainable culture of reliability.
Quick Summary
One of the world’s largest cane sugar refiners and marketers partnered with Life Cycle Engineering to enhance plant performance and achieve:
- $18.7 million in projected savings over three years.
- Target increased availability to 96.9% and first pass quality rate of 99%
- Improved Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), with an estimated average of 3% increase over five sites, equaling $4.2M in returns
- 5 sites using LCEsmartr Playbook training, aligning the organization on reliability terminology and best practices
- A culture of engagement through standardized reliability practices
Unlock your organization’s potential with world-class training and expertise from Life Cycle Engineering. For more information, email us at info@LCE.com or visit LCEsmartr.com
