Black Spruce Analytics

In this era of urbanization and tighter funding, most municipal managers know that their path to community sustainability and generational rate equity is through Infrastructure Asset Management. It also has important implications for reducing life-cycle costs in manufacturing, especially for those aspiring to high-quality processes or lean manufacturing.

Coupled with Reliability-centred Maintenance, Asset Management can lead to profound increases in efficiency and naturally leads to generational rate equity.

Municipal managers understand the value that asset management principles and practice can offer to their community. Perhaps you have invested in the NAMS, ISO, or IAM training for some of your staff. Maybe you’ve engaged an engineering firm to prepare an AM plan for you, or started the first round of the asset management cycle. You may have really taken off and are continually improving your AM program.

Too often, however, it is easy to get side-tracked; it can seem everyone is expected to complete these extra duties off the side of their desk. There are still small problems cropping up every day, demanding your attention. The methods from your training are getting rusty. That asset management plan tells you where to go but you’re not quite sure how to get there, or where to find the resources for the journey.

Reactive maintenance cultures can arise anywhere, even in organizations with the best intentions not to be reactive. Oftentimes this comes from years of slow cuts to maintenance budgets, where facilities managers are expected to do the same (or more) with less resources. Or perhaps there was an expansion without increased funding to maintain the new assets. Or maintenance costs have been increasing for years, but the budget hasn’t kept up.

When organizations fail to invest in their infrastructure, they are borrowing against their assets—a silent disease that can sap the up-time of your physical plant. Ultimately, this produces a self-reinforcing feedback that keeps you spilling money into short term solutions, working against an ever-rising tide of faults and failures that prevent you from producing product for your customers.

Infrastructure asset management is a holistic methodology for getting what you need out of your assets most efficiently. That means looking closely at:

• What you need, in terms of levels of service and customer demand
• Examining technical requirements for implementation
• Developing coordinated policies for operation, maintenance and financial aspects of the assets from a life cycle perspective
• And finally, formulating cost-per-level of service

This whole cycle repeats, providing a basis for continuous improvement.

• Municipal utility services: water treatment, distribution, collection
• Municipal road and equipment maintenance
• Manufacturing
• In fact, any organization with significant investment in its physical plant would benefit from Asset Management and Reliability Centred Maintenance

Most of all, it’s your stakeholders who benefit from this, because you’re delivering the services they need in most efficient way, from a holistic, life-cycle perspective.

They key point about implementing asset management is to focus on people. Everyone needs to work together to make this happen. Holistic solutions need the whole organization to get behind them. So what can we do for you?

• Team: Facilitate the creation of an implementation team
• Standards: Provide you with the standards we use (IIMM, ISO 55000), help you navigate them and develop policies that fit with your community
• Pitfall Avoidance: We’ll steer you clear of pitfalls (It’s not just about data. And software isn’t a solution to your problems—it’s an automator of your pre-existing business processes.)
• Analytical Support: We guide your organization through the cycle, supporting your efforts with predictive analytics and decision analysis
• Integration: We can integrate with your team as much or as little as you need
• Do it for you: We can manage your implementation for you while you get up to speed
• Staff Engagement: Apply change management principles to foster buy-in and engagement from your staff and community
• Flexible: Be with you for the long haul, or on a project basis
• We’re available, flexible, and have unique expertise that will get you moving

To get out—and stay out—of a reactive culture, maintenance can no longer be the budget punching bag, and the whole organization must understand the implications of borrowing against the their infrastructure.

We’ll help you bring about real change, not just to your process but to the culture of your maintenance and operations.

We use people-centred service delivery to help you surmount the barriers to proactive maintenance and find a culture of reliability at your organization:

• Maintenance planning: Bring our expertise in planning proactive maintenance with RCM principles into your facility
• Motivation: We design and implement ways to motivate your employees—fostering buy-ins and motivate them to change for the better
• Coaching: Working directly with your staff to manage day to day issues with practical, on-the-job mentoring—maximizing knowledge transfer to your organization
• On-site maintenance manager: Put our man on your job—secondment can help you tackle reactivity if you’re short of staff. Once you find the right person for a permanent position, we can transition to a coaching regime so your organization continues to realize the benefits.
• Support for developing procedures and terms of reference for handling engineering and maintenance contracts
• Support for managing computerized maintenance management systems and assistance evaluating proposals for software solutions
• Operator certification training: We offer in-house training for Levels I to IV in addition to small systems operator certification training. We believe in going not just in-house, but into the plant for training, so that operators receive the maximum benefit.
• Operator maintenance training and certification training: Maintenance often falls to the operator, especially in small communities. In partnership with the Plant Engineering and Maintenance Association of Canada we offer introductory maintenance courses to qualified candidates.