PetStar has become the second plant globally to be awarded IDCON’s World Class Reliability and Maintenance Status.
IDCON defines a World Class status as a plant that achieves a score greater than 75. PetStar achieved a rating of 78.8.
PetStar director of operations Bernardo Salazar attributes a 2% increase in production to the implementation of improvement initiatives identified after two previous IDCON Current Best Practices assessments.
IDCON’s Current Best Practices for reliability and maintenance (CBP) assessment rates 204 well defined reliability and maintenance elements (RME) as to how well they are documented and, more importantly, how well they are executed.
The RMEs are part of following key best practices processes
- Leadership and organisation
- Preventive Maintenance
- Work Management
- Root Cause Problem Elimination
- Skills development
- Facilities
- Tools and workshops
- Technical Database
- Stores management and Engineering interface with maintenance
The assessment has been performed in over 200 plants worldwide and only two plants have achieved a rating over 75. A food processing plant in New Zealand achieved 78.2 in 2008, and now PetStar.
This assessment is very thorough, and depending on the size of the maintenance organisation, it requires one to three senior consultants spending more than a week to carry out the assessment.
IDCON founder and CEO Christer Idhammar stated that some of the keys to PetStar’s success in achieving the World Class status included
- Visual and engaged long term leadership. PetStar’s CEO Jaime Camara showed engaged interest and participated in exit presentations of all assessments
- Engaged, competent and enthusiastic employees
- Well defined and executed best practices
Furthermore, visual examples of best practices were observed during the assessment. Some visual examples included
- Equipment modified and designed for maintainability, such as the ability to inspect, safe access and lifting of equipment
- Motors, gears, pumps and other rotating equipment kept as spares in store rotated on set intervals
- Delivery and staging of parts and tools for planned work in designated areas
- Using applicable tools for condition monitoring
- Root Cause Problem Elimination executed with well defined triggers. Root Cause Problem Elimination of any problem that meets a trigger is done on the plant floor, often on the same day that the problem is triggered.
