54. Do your asset failures come as a surprise? It’s time to change your maintenance strategy and turn maintenance into a contributor to your profitability

Louis Houle (1); (1) Systemex Industrial Consutling, St. Johns, FL, U.S.A.

Technical Session 15: World Class Manufacturing
Tuesday, August 16  •  9:45–11:30 a.m.
Plaza Building, Concourse Level, Governor’s Square 15

Are you always taken by surprise when you have an equipment breakdown? Executing repairs in an emergency situation typically costs 3 to 4 times as much as executing the same repairs in a planned fashion. Is most of the planned maintenance work done in your facility time-based, based on the manufacturer’s suggestions or because it’s always been done that way? It’s time to move out of reactive maintenance and into proactive maintenance. In this day and age, a sound maintenance strategy is based on your organizational objectives and the consequences associated with potential failures. It uses an asset criticality assessment to identify the critical assets and applies the principles of failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) to identify critical failures. It moves from time-based or usage-based systematic replacements to condition-based predictive maintenance and treats hidden failures using proactive maintenance. Implementing a maintenance strategy that balances preventive, predictive and proactive maintenance, considers total cost of ownership and controls risk is the most important step for all organizations, large or small, in order to turn your maintenance department from a cost center into a profit center.

Louis received a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, ON. He also holds an MBA from the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, ON. His entire career has been spent in operations, including eight years with Kraft Foods and another eight years with Bacardi. At Kraft, he held several roles: project engineer, maintenance supervisor and maintenance manager. This is where he gained great foundational knowledge in bottling, packaging, operations and asset performance management. He then increased this experience and gained significant new experience in the spirit industry while he was the director of operations for Bacardi Canada in Brampton, ON, and also as the plant director for the Bacardi Bottling Corporation in Jacksonville, FL. Louis is currently the managing partner for Systemex Industrial Consulting USA, based in Jacksonville, FL, where he is responsible for commissioning management, asset performance management and risk management practices for the United States. Systemex is a strategic and tactical consulting firm that helps its clients optimize the reliability, availability and cost of industrial assets throughout their entire life cycle.

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