Maintenance Program Boosts Victrex's Sustainability, Productivity, and Reliability

Asset Improvement Mapping
MaxGrip started the project with an assessment, the Asset Improvement Mapping (AIM), on one of the Victrex production units. The assessment includes fourteen essential asset management competencies, related to the three dimensions of asset reliability, overall management and execution of maintenance and inspection. As part of the AIM, MaxGrip interviewed 35 stakeholders across the organization. An AIM typically involves around 25 people, depending on the size of the site. In this case, Victrex asked to expand the stakeholder group in order to scope the potential to do assessments at other plants at the Hillhouse site. These interviews were done remotely due to COVID-restrictions. Additionally, due to these limitations MaxGrip performed the first plant walkdown remotely with Google Glasses. MaxGrip created the proven MaxGrip Asset Improvement Map, using this valuable information, the stakeholder input, the information gathered from data downloads, performance reports and data analyses. MaxGrip engaged with Victrex’s core
team to achieve full alignment and then presented and discussed the findings, and – more importantly – recommended the way forward to Victrex key stakeholders including the COO of the company.

While there was room for improvement, the powder plants also showed best
practices. These included the new asset management strategy, a clear focus
on safety as a first priority, a mitigation process in place for overdue Preventive
Maintenance (PMs) and a promising asset integrity management strategy and
proposals.

MaxGrip’s recommendations included:

• Management: improvement of tracking and monitoring, the creation of a better asset compliance overview and further development of an asset-based OPEX budget.
• Maintenance execution: Improve the work execution optimization loop, use of standard task list library and the development of intake, close-out and reporting standards, maximizing the use of the CMMS system.
• Reliability: set up of Asset Criticality Ranking (ACR), review and update of
  PM program and turning the promising asset integrity management proposals into one strategy document and implement it.

These and more improvement recommendations were used for a full currentstate maturity mapping and improvement roadmap. These actions created a target setting per Asset Performance Management (APM) competence. The implementation of these recommendations will see Victrex progressively improving their maintenance excellence with an effective, globally scalable approach and at a pace which matches the capability of the organization.

Deployment in workstreams
The next step is the first one for a deployment, also called an Asset Improvement
Deployment (AID). This entails the further detailing of an improvement roadmap,
the planning and deliverables. The AIM has provided a first high-level with which
our client takes over the lead. They are supported by MaxGrip consultants with
their experience and insights also from other projects and comparable clients.

Victrex demonstrated their ability to take ownership and create the Asset
Improvement Deployment program (AID), together with MaxGrip. The deployment
was split up in different workstreams, all owned by Victrex Leads with named
owners to lead each workstream and individual workstream objectives, as well
as the overall coherence and interdependencies:

What followed was a site visit and a number of workshops in which the workstream
leads worked together with MaxGrip staff to refine their workstream business case,
their specific goals, detailed planning and required resources, skill sets and time.
The workstream leads presented their plans to the COO and in a meeting with all
of the leads and MaxGrip together, it was decided to start with four workstreams
(in bold above). These workstreams are seen to be fundamental to realizing
asset performance improvements across the plants already in the short term.
The streams also influence and have essential inputs to the other three streams,
which justifies starting with these four.

The four workstreams with which we started:

1. Program Management
   This runs through and oversees all of the other workstreams and safeguards
   project management and change management. This includes setting up
   the governance of the overall program, alignment of project activities, the
   communication and engagement plan as well as the progress tracking and
   monitoring of all projects.
2. Foundations
   This consists of the development of an asset management foundation
   structure (global), the development of the Long-Term Asset Planning (LTAP)
   process, finetuning of the overall maintenance strategies, redefining roles and
   responsibilities, required capabilities and deliverables, as well as the development
   of Asset Integrity Management strategy with associated tracking and tracing.
3. Optimization of preventive maintenance program
   Some of the core elements of this workstream are: performing and updating asset
   criticality rankings, the development of Preventive Maintenance (PM) standards,
   the review and optimization of the PM program, measuring PM effectiveness.
4. CMMS/ EAM
   This workstream focuses on introducing a better and common CMMS (Enterprise
   Asset Management (EAM) system. Victrex realized that a sustainable improvement
   could only be achieved by having an EAM system which would fill essential gaps
   in the current system. This not only implied to set up a very clear requirement
   specification, but also to map out the business processes and functional interfaces to other systems and disciplines. It also includes the creation of a so-called common data standard (taxonomy) configuration of the EAM system. Moreover, it entails the creation of a balanced and realistic EAM roll-out plan, not affecting current production, training and familiarization of the users, data cleansing etc. Relevant reports are being created and validated to be able to monitor and steer actual asset performance improvements, as set out in the initial plan.