MANAGING REDUNDANCY

While working for an oil and gas wireline services company many years ago, we were subjected to very stringent "lost time" requirements. This was was made more difficult by the extreme borehole conditions and workplace environments.

To ensure continuous uptime every time, we diligently check and recheck our equipment through quarterly, monthly and weekly checks plus site checks. However, man's proposal is god's disposal. Failures do happen. When this happen, we rely on the reliable maintenance mainstay technique of providing 100% redundancy for every piece of equipment. All this combined gave us very low downtime. Our "lost time" were mostly the "equipment and material not at fault" kind.

If part of your maintenance strategy involves the use of redundant standby equipment such as standby power gensets, may we suggest that you use the "notes to technicians" field available in the CWorks asset module. In this field you should describe any redundancy available for the particular piece of equipment. These notes will automatically be displayed in the work order and be made available to the maintenance technician. This way precious time can be reduced.

These "notes" may also be modified in the work order module thus if a technician needs to update it through the work order, she can. Also service quality issues can also be attached in this "notes" field creating a real time quality control circle environment.