A Maintenance Management System Concept, Implementation And Experience
Authors: Logan W.A.D. , Campbell H. 
Published: December 2007

Introduction

This paper outlines the fundamental features which the authors consider essential in a maintenance management system for a North Sea production platform. The paper describes in detail a system devised for Mobil's Beryl 'A' platform and discusses the experience gained during 18 months of operation.

Concept

The ideal maintenance management system should ensure optimum plant performance for lowest practical financial outlay, and should provide for the supply of adequate management data to demonstrate achievement of these aims. While such aims are laudable, there are many parameters which constrain the form that the system can take, viz:It must cover all the equipment in the plant.It must give instructions which can be understood by the maintainers.It must ensure that the work is done in a logical order.It must ensure that all tasks are carried out with due regard to safety regulations.It must be flexible enough to cope with unscheduled repairs.It must be able to record that work has or has not been done.It must generate sufficient information to supply comprehensive management data.It must not swamp the platform in paper work. Expanding these requirements a little more fully:List of Equipment. One of the primary tasks in the preparation of a maintenance management system is to ensure that an accurate list of all the equipment fitted on the platform is available, since it is clearly impossible to proceed without this.Description of Work to be Done. In any maintenance system there must be an adequate description of the work to be done on each equipment. This description must reflect the skill levels of the staff involved, being neither too detailed nor too brief, and must be sufficiently comprehensive to ensure that, not only is the work done properly, but that all relevant safety actions are taken before, during and after the maintenance task.Plan of When Each Task is to be Done. Because most maintenance is determined by a time factor, it is important to plan the work to be done to match the production plan and to distribute the maintenance workload evenly over the year in order to have a balanced workload which does not have extreme peaks or cause hotel overloads on the platform. Since some pieces of equipment are in series in a plant, and the shutdown of the others, then it is logical to endeavour to carry out maintenance on the other pieces of equipment at the same time. This gives rise to grouping jobs in job packages. These must be planned to ensure that the labour requirements can be controlled.Method of Control and Instruction of Work to be Done. Formalised methods of disseminating the maintenance instructions to the appropriate maintainers are well understood, but in an offshore environment - where weather can have a very dominant effect on the daily running of the platform - the maintenance control system must be capable of dealing with frequent changes to the programme without incurring major administrative and clerical problems.Record of Work Done. There must be a carefully controlled method of recording what has been done, in an unambiguous way, so that the maintenance and repair history of the equipment can be assessed and assimilated quickly. The data must be in a form suitable for presentation to representatives of the Certifying Authority during their planned or random visits.