By Robert “Bob” DiStefano – Chief Operations Officer

Abe Lincoln famously quipped, “Give me six hours to cut down a tree and I will spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.” A few months ago, I announced the addition of PCA’s field engineering services, which are specifically designed to help keep your maintenance management tools sharp. We are able to offer these services at much lower billing rates, which our clients really appreciate. I am very happy to let you know that our customers are already engaging these services and seeing the benefits of being better equipped.

Shortly after our announcement, a client engaged us to develop bills-of-materials for several hundred assets. Our engineers are setting up the BOMs for their most critical assets by finding the associated parts, assuring that they are accurately described in the MRO catalog and that stock levels are adequate. They are also checking the validity of existing BOMs and eliminating any obsolete or redundant MRO catalog entries. Overall, this project is expected to result in more than a million dollars in storeroom savings while also greatly improving the efficiency of the maintenance planning function.

Another client has engaged us for a thorough PM optimization project. We are currently on track to eliminate more than 50% of their PMs, because they are not related to the detection or prevention of failure modes. This project has a very strong business case, including the reduction of contract labor costs and MRO parts spend.

Reliability transformations often require all hands on deck, leaving no spare capacity for improving basic building blocks like foundational data. Our field engineering services help clients through these transitional times by giving them the edge they need to organize and execute work more efficiently. It is very gratifying to see our clients adopt this offering and exciting to see it grow!