Siveco China's General Manager, Bruno Lhopiteau, answered questions from CHEMICAL BUSINESS MAGAZINE, the leading media in Chinese chemical industry.

Why do we need maintenance for industry zones?

From a financial point of view, this has a real impact after a few years of operation, when equipment starts aging and breakdown rate increases. For example, we have worked on large chemical plants that after 4 or 5 years of operation were experiencing high failure rates in critical equipments – only to find out that they were due to design problems, i.e. problems that should have been solved during commissioning or early operations. This is not uncommon. The problems may not be obvious in the beginning, as teams can be very reactive and fix problems fast and cheap. Only when they become out of control, thus very costly in terms of production losses, downtime and repair costs, management would start paying attention to them. However organizations are not equipped to handle the failures analysis and subsequent actions required.

 
How to improve daily maintenance work?

Maintenance is indeed critical. Survey show that the indirect cost of maintenance – downtime, increased energy consumption, bad product quality, etc. – is over 10 times higher than the direct cost (employees, spares, contracts). Our experience in China have been that implementing computerized maintenance management systems is a good way to structure the maintenance department, to bring "best practice" especially with regards to preventive maintenance, to an organization, to enable a continuous improvement process. ROI can be very high, typically the cost of the system is recovered in just a few months, never more than one year. It is easier said than done, however, as an IT project will never solve management problems – such a project is an industrial endeavor, not IT. Few people understand this in the Chinese market, as IT people lack industry experience and maintenance people lack IT experience.

 
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