The Northern Miner Magazine recently sent a questionnaire asking key maintenance people at Canada’s northern mines to list some of the problems they’ve been grappling with. We also asked them to offer solutions that undoubtedly came from the bitter school of experience. Computerized maintenance management was one item at the top of their lists. Computerization is now accepted by the mining industry, but our respondents say northern mines are not suitable for computer experimentation. The program selected should address only the critical areas of a good basic system and the operation of the system should be easily understood.
Availability of equipment depends on consistent maintenance and, with high worker turnover, consistency can only be maintained with clear instructions that even a new person can follow. Once established, a maintenance schedule should be changed only gradually by additional preventive routines identified through analysis of the completed repairs. At remote minesites, it is not a matter of the maintenance staff accepting and adapting to a new way of doing things; it is a matter of each new employee following basic procedures to the letter. Basic System
Successful maintenance requires a balance between available manpower and work flow. All the work, the absenteeism and overtime must achieve equilibrium. To achieve this, the workload must be known and priorities established. Priorities should reflect the difference between repetitive and non-repetitive work scheduled a week or more in advance, on the one hand, and running repairs (which come up at the last minute and have to be completed quickly) on the other. Repetitive work is done after emergencies and is arranged so that the time scheduled for it each week is relatively even. Jobs not requiring the shutting down of equipment can be done with relative ease and without approval from production. Other planned jobs are scheduled to fit into the production plan. The most critical jobs are those that require an interruption in production or essential services.
All requests for maintenance should be written. This enables the work to be tracked to completion. The instructions should tell the worker as precisely as possible what is to be done and where the time should be charged.
Scheduling centres around the basic resources:
* the equipment must be made available at the best time for all concerned;
* the necessary repair materials must be on hand;
* the right skills in the proper quantity must be available.
Work cannot be scheduled unless materials are ready. Control of materials involves requisitioning through purchasing, expediting from suppliers, and continually reviewing stock materials to help ensure stockage of proper parts in the correct quantities. In the far north, these functions are critical.
To judge maintenance performance, labor and material costs must be assessed. Other factors to consider are unscheduled plant or area shutdowns caused by equipment or plant malfunction, trend of percentage of scheduled work and trend of the backlog. Accurate and timely reporting in a format easily analysed is also a must. Personnel
Effective maintenance depends primarily on how well the maintenance foreman copes with all the demands of his job. In the far north, as elsewhere, improvisation is needed.
Teamwork develops quickly out of neccessity. The foreman’s skills in evaluating, directing and counselling are constantly in demand. The shadow hanging perpetually over northern operations is turnover. This is being combatted in various ways, but the threat is always there. The maintenance system must be self-sufficient, providing the services for which it was designed, regardless of turnover. New employees must be able to pick up the threads with little or no disruption to the service.
In the north, there is no room for lightweights. The challenge is in coping quickly with the unexpected. This requires people with temperaments suited to their particular type of work. It requires people who prefer to work alone but who can work well in a small group without close supervision, who like jobs that matter and who can handle pressure. Questionnaire Specific responses to the questionnaire distributed to five operations north of the 60th Parallel included some surprises:
* Computerized management systems are not used by everyone.
* Among the reasons that make maintenance tougher, compliance with safety regulations was rated high, and shortage of skilled workers was rated low. In one case, tradesmen do not supply their own tools.
* While well-equipped machine shops are the norm north of 60, one respondent suggested that the capital and operating costs are not justified when good planning and a well- stocked warehouse relegate the prime function of the shop to the fabrication of emergency parts.
* Wear particle analysis for oil is common, and there is some vibration analysis and infrared testing.
* One respondent finds his operation’s high-calibre communication system to be particularly useful as a working aid.
* Where there are townsites, shifts last eight hours not more than six days consecutively. Turnover at one operation is 35%.
* A fly-in/fly-out schedule with 12-hour shifts uses a 7-day-in/7-day- out cycle for staff with a 5% turnover, and 14-in/14-out for hourly with a 22% turnover. Another provides two weeks vacation after 10 weeks of a 6-day, 11-hour shift schedule in which Sunday is optional. Fully 60% work on Sunday. Turnover for staff is 25% and hourly 30%. Keith Bowley is a Toronto-based maintenance consultant.
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