Problem:

One of Imperial Oil’s production fields in Alberta Canada needed to improve their maintenance program for their mining equipment.  This facility converts the Canadian oil sands into regular sand by extracting the crude oil.  Because the sand is very damaging to the equipment, maintenance is required more often than other mining operations would require.  The consulting company Don worked for at the time was tasked with improving the field maintenance operations so that equipment downtime, labor, and material costs were minimized.

Analysis:

Don was tasked with figuring out how to improve the documentation process for maintenance tracking.  Imperial Oil had a database that tracked the daily activities of the maintenance activities well but was not effective for retrieving information.  The other consultants were working on scheduling, inventory, and work process improvements.  It didn’t take long to discover that information between the departments did not flow smoothly.  To determine KPI values, create reports, and automate scheduling, data needed to be pulled from many databases.  Access to information and data was the biggest roadblock for getting anything done.

Solution:

Since fixing the data access problem was not part of our scope, it was still a problem for us to do what we were hired to do.  However, we still needed to get to the data so we could do what we were hired to do:

1.      Created a database that read maintenance data from the existing maintenance tracking database.  It also stored the data from the other consulting areas, so that all reporting could come from one location. 

2.      Wrote a project scope for Imperial Oil to consolidate their databases into SAP, so that the whole site can use their maintenance records for their scheduling, preventive maintenance, inventory control, and product availability projections. 

Results:

The consulting firm was able to complete the work they were hired to do because they had access to the maintenance information they needed.