The benefits of maintenance outsourcing

By Bruce Olive

PlantServices.com

Intelligent asset management combined with maintenance outsourcing can lead to significant savings on MRO costs and increase your return on your assets.

Outsourcing in recent months has become a contentious issue for the public. Even government officials are feeling the pressure as they try to cut bottom-line costs by outsourcing jobs overseas.

Plant managers have been feeling similar pressures. Caught at the mercy of a tight market for skilled field technicians and stuck in the crosshairs of management directives to boost the bottom line, many plant managers are turning to alternative approaches to manage their operations, maintenance, and asset management needs.

Among these new and alternative approaches is the use of sophisticated asset/equipment management systems. These tactics also include the formation of non-traditional vendor partnerships to outsource non-core processes and build cost-cutting applications. With the goal of lowering costs and improving efficiencies and downtimes, maintenance and production managers across the operational spectrum find themselves integrating these new approaches as a vital part of their plant management arsenal.

Maintenance Outsourcing
A big part of the outsourcing equation, particularly for managers facing hiring freezes, cuts in training budgets, aging maintenance workforces, and hard-to-find skilled labor pools, is maintenance outsourcing. Today, maintenance outsourcing provided by outside vendors is covering more and more maintenance tasks once handled by in-house staff.

Maintenance support for specialized valves and actuators has long been outsourced.  Routine maintenance for other control and automation processes is now being handled by outsourcing vendors as well.

“Facilities have pared down costs, increasingly relying on vendors for service,” says Craig Resnick, research director of the ARC Advisory Group, a leader in providing strategic planning and technology assessment services to manufacturing companies.

What are the advantages of outsourcing? Outsourcing enables budget flexibility. It lets organizations pay for only the services they need and when they need them. It also reduces the need to hire and train specialized staff, brings in engineering expertise from the outside, and reduces capital expense, yielding better control of operating costs. The outsourcing arrangement can change as your maintenance needs change.

Doug Schuler is the instrument reliability coordinator with BP Amoco Texas City and a Puffer-Sweiven contractor. He’s also a control valve specialist.

“There’s a clear trend to using more and more contractors all the time,” Schuler says. “Using a contractor to focus 100 percent on a particular area lets you better manage existing assets.

“Because I focus 100 percent on control valves, I not only better manage that area, but I provide a resource for other engineers.”

Advances in technology are making such expertise not just desirable, but increasingly essential. In Schuler’s experience, it’s the OEM who has the know-how to provide that expertise.

“Control valves are highly engineered products. You cannot expect a third party to appreciate or fully understand engineering designs perfected over a period of years. The OEM has intimate knowledge of how such things as changes in trim or operating conditions affect their products.”

Vendor-Customer Partnerships
Just because plants are getting help from the outside doesn’t mean that managers are removed from the process. To the contrary, close partnerships are developing between manufacturers and end users. The free exchange of information and resources helps them pursue common goals: cutting costs, increasing efficiency, and extending product life.

Larry Lizner, senior maintenance engineer with Celanese Chemical, got his group together with a vendor to redesign a control valve based on observed failure points.

“We actually spent time in one of Flowserve’s engineering offices, re-engineering an indexing seat design in a ball valve we use,” says Lizner.

“It was a very positive experience. We don’t have new mean time between failure data yet, because our new design has yet to fail. Reliability is our number one concern, so it was a win-win from our perspective.”

Flowserve’s Durham believes such partnerships play a key role in reducing maintenance costs.

“Flexibility is paramount,” Durham says. “Metrics may be needed for anything from a single loop to multiple plants.”

Durham uses software and consulting to help his customers reduce MRO costs.

“It has helped our customers identify critical valves and bad actors, optimize inventory, prioritize turnarounds and shutdowns, and increase mean time between repairs.”

Reducing MRO Costs & Improving ROA
At ARC, Resnick says that his organization’s clients are looking to predicting and preventing failures as the key to reducing their maintenance, repair and operation (MRO) costs, and to increasing their return on assets.

“It’s not just the equipment cost and number of valves and controls, but the financial impact of failure on production,” Resnick says. “That’s why improving your maintenance practices deserves so much attention.”

A trend toward outsourcing maintenance and adopting asset management applications is helping operators make the improvements that Resnick says are crucial to keeping plants up and running, and keeping costs down.