Hello Srihari
Here is a quick high-level set of things you can consider.
a. Management system
i. Do you have good cost reporting from the financial system i.e. cost centre, by G/L account. Also ensure that you capture costs into the work order so you can do cost reporting by functional location, equipment or component
ii. Do you have benchmark costs against which you can compare your actual performance to best in class. Benchmarking is complex and there are many variables to consider to ensure that the benchmarks are representative of your situation. This is something your corporate office needs to do.
iii. Do you have standardised routines for the weekly and monthly reporting, review and control of maintenance costs.
iv. Do you have analysis of where your big areas of spend are (by equipment and component type e.g. bearings). Run a kaizen activity to understand and reduce spend in the high areas.
b. Consumption Initiatives – while consumption initiatives are typically lead by maintenance/engineering, procurement is a key parter
i. Improve reliability in a structured lean approach. If you do this, then you will have higher reliability at a lower cost. This point is a full topic on its own.
ii. Implement RCM and transition as many maintenance tasks as financially and technically possible to condition monitoring or predictive maintenance.
iii. OEM to OPM – do you buy spare parts that are manufactured by original part manufacturers (OPM) through the OEM. In general OPM parts purchased from OEM's are usually more expensive. You should have an active program identifying OPM parts on OEM machines and investigate whether it is cheaper to transition to OPM.
iv. OEM and OPM to alternative suppliers – identify alternative suppliers of parts and go through a competitive tendering to see if you can get better pricing from the OPM or alternative supplier. There are often concerns that alternative suppliers are not necessarily good quality and while this may be true in some cases it is not universally true e.g. SKF vs NSK bearings. Between OEM to OPM and OEM & OPM to alternative suppliers you will find significant savings provided you do a good technical due diligence.
v. Do you have a program to extend the life of machine components. For example changing to a calcium based grease may increase unit costs by 20 % but result in 6 times less consumption; delivering an overall cost saving. This action can be tied to the point in the management system about kaizens
vi. Look at insourcing repairs and overhauls where it makes sense. It is convenient to send items to third parties to repair but as you become more mature in your maintenance (i.e. you are not in a breakdown cycle) your technicians can develop advanced maintenance skills that will allow then to repair and overhaul equipment inhouse
vii. Utilise technology to reduce the costs of certain maintenance tasks e.g. drones for roof integrity inspections etc
c. Price Initiatives – while price initiatives are predominantly lead by the procurement function, maintenance is a key partner
i. Vendor tail reduction and consolidation – understand what vendors you use for different types of spare parts and aim to consolidate this spend into fewer vendors. This volume consolidation will allow the vendors to give you better pricing
ii. Share with procurement you big areas of spend (parts and services) and ask them to go on tender for these parts and services to get better pricing
iii. Understand customs and freight costs and look for ways of reducing this. Customs and freight costs are not readily apparent and there are opportunities for improvement by just managing it better
iv. Look for price mis-matches especially between the ex-works price from the OEM and the price the local agent charge. Local agents can charge a reasonable markup but sometimes this can be very high and needs to be managed
I hope this gives you some ideas on how to approach this.
Regards
Sangeev
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Sangeev Parbhu
London ON
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Original Message:
Sent: 11-23-2023 11:41 PM
From: Srihari R
Subject: Man hour calculation on SAP PM module
Dear Sirs,
Greetings for the day! We are providing maintenance services to our client plant, which is a primary aluminium smelter. The client has installed SAP PM module for logging the maintenance work that is being done on the site. For gaining understanding of the quantum of work that is being done, it is needed to calculate the man hours that are expended in each job. Does SAP have capability for doing the same? As of now, we are creating work orders on SAP and the intervention duration is getting calculated on SAP. For calculation of manhours, we are doing it offline in a spreadsheet. I would like to explore any capability that SAP has so that it can come from SAP directly without having to spend time on calculations offline. Any pointers to this end would be great. Thanks in advance!
Regards,
Srihari
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Srihari R,
Manager-Asset Management
Thyssenkrupp Industries India Ltd
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