Specialized Manpower to Build the Detailed Data You Need
Field Engineering Services

Our clients frequently encounter limitations in their ability to improve because they lack the manpower to build the data assets they need. PCA provides field engineering resources with the skills and abilities to efficiently develop the necessary data assets. Our personnel allow your team to stay focused on their operational roles with minimal disruption. 

PM Optimization (PMO) Services:

Most plants have an abundance of calendar-based PMs, but many of those existing PMs lack quantitative measures, were truncated or botched when they were converted into a new EAM system, and a large percentage of them are not addressing known failure modes of the equipment in question.  

Beyond that, most plants struggle to keep up with the existing PMs and often don’t get them done on schedule or at all in some cases. The end result is deferred maintenance, which leads to unplanned downtime and lower overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). 

Most existing PMs originated from the OEM recommendations, and those are rarely modern strategies for caring for equipment. Our PMO services draw on Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) principles to develop asset reliability strategies that are the most appropriate and efficient set of actions for each asset. 

PMO includes streamlined and rapid failure analysis of the maintainable components, and then review of existing PMs to ensure they are addressing failure modes. On average more than 50% of existing PMs do not address failure modes and are candidates for elimination, and/or replacement with condition monitoring and predictive technology strategies.  

Surviving calendar-based PMs often need strengthening with quantitative measures to ensure the PM is done correctly and consistently and not dependent on the skills of the assigned maintenance worker. An effective PMO results in a large shift from calendar-based maintenance intervention to condition-based maintenance intervention, and the benefits include reduced scheduled downtime, reduction in unnecessary maintenance work, objective and early triggering of corrective work through condition monitoring, and facilitation of shifting maintenance workers to more value-added activities.  

PCA can deploy our Senior Consultants and Field Engineers to perform proper and effective PMO. We will implement a maintenance planner workflow that facilitates true preventative maintenance, thereby increasing overall equipment effectiveness. 

Bills of Material (BOM) Review and BOM Creation Services:

The primary objective of the BOM review and creation process is to facilitate rapid finding of the right parts in the right condition, quantity, and time required to support the proactive maintenance model.  BOMs are a critical enabling component to a top-quartile work management process, and many companies suffer significant and costly consequences from having incomplete, inaccurate, or missing BOMs. On average, across numerous industrial and manufacturing industries, Fourth Quartile companies have less than 30% of the plant’s assets covered by complete and accurate BOMs loaded into the Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS). Top Quartile companies have over 70% of their equipment covered with BOMs, that connect equipment and materials in their CMMS systems.  

Organizations realize a variety of benefits by having complete and accurate BOMs that cover a large percentage of the plant equipment. Some of these benefits include:

• Higher maintenance craftsman wrench time (as much as 2 hours per day per craftsman) 
• Reduced frustration for plant personnel searching for parts in the CMMS and often not finding them 
• Decreased stock-outs resulting in fewer expensive, rush shipments to the site 
• Optimized inventory with as much as 25% fewer items required to be stocked 
• Precision repairs using the properly engineered spare parts, resulting in shorter Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and longer Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) 
• Decreased equipment downtime 

PCA has developed an effective and efficient BOM review and creation process in which our senior consultant and field engineer will work closely with site personnel to provide a thorough and practical set of high-quality and usable “Planner” bills of materials (BOMs). It is important to distinguish between complete Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) BOMs and Planner BOMs. Planner BOMs primarily include the worn parts that are likely to be needed for normal corrective and preventive maintenance activities. OEM BOMs are expensive to create, offer little incremental value, and are often recommended by OEMs because they typically want to sell more parts, including ones that you will not actually need during the life of the machine in question. 

In short, existing BOMs are gathered and de-cluttered, removing items that are not truly spare parts (gloves, PPE, penetrating oils, tools, etc.). These items often find their way onto BOMs via some automatic processes in the work order system. Existing BOMs are then updated to ensure that all parts that are likely to be used during routine maintenance are included. Improving spare parts management protocols promotes less wasteful spending while also decluttering the stock room, making it easier for maintenance personnel to locate the parts they need when they need them. 

Source material includes the OEM-recommended spare parts lists, historical parts usage at the site, tribal knowledge of site personnel, local documentation, and our own BOM library for common equipment.  In most cases, existing BOMs do not cover a large percentage of installed equipment, so our Field Engineers also create new BOMs for the targeted equipment – often starting with the most critical equipment and working through the equipment list until approximately 70% of the equipment is covered. Finally, once BOMs are edited and/or created, our Field Engineers will search the existing equipment database to find equipment in the plant that could benefit from that BOM. While care must be exercised due to possible differences in the material of construction, leveraging BOMs to like equipment multiplies the coverage significantly.