maj 9, 2023
When is the right time to involve maintenance experts at a greenfield site?
When building a new plant or expanding an existing production plant, it is of essence to establish and implement a state-of-the-art maintenance function to ensure full leverage of the capital invested.
The timing of engaging maintenance experts plays a significant role because if you focus more on the initial procurement cost rather than the life cycle cost (LCC), it can become a costly lesson. In fact, up to 80 percent of the LCC is determined before commissioning starts, and supporting costs are often 2-20 times greater than the initial procurement costs. If every aspect has not been thought through, the likelyhood of unexpected situations and cost estimation overruns will increase.
The maintenance professionals know how to analyse LCC and structure the maintenance function with focus on reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety (RAMS). They will ensure that all the aspects are truly considered at an early stage, and it will have a significant impact on ROI and plant performance.
The importance of a clear maintenance strategy
New plants have modern equipment, which will provide large quantities of operational data, and it needs to be utilized in a smart way to create value. To succeed, you need employees who have long experience of maintenance development and digitalization, who will think about what data to extract, how to utilize it, and what function it should fulfil.
Any company aiming for a sustainable production and stronger competitiveness, needs to have a clear maintenance strategy, as well as practices, know-how, and modern technology embedded into their processes to successfully operate a new production plant.
With Quant’s wide network of expertise, we can provide customers the resources and skills needed for a successful start-up of a greenfield site. Typical activities include to set maintenance processes, design the maintenance organization, hire and train technicians, to ramp up the maintenance organization step by step and having maintenance instructions ready and tested for the start of production. Modern maintenance processes and a field expert as a partner will directly affect the equipment availability and production efficiency.
A growing challenge in future competence supply
Industries are going to be hit hard by a shortage of skilled workers. Areas located far from the bigger cities are already struggling to fill vacancies with qualified candidates.
There are a few key factors that are affecting the situation, for example; experienced workers are retiring, and the new generation tend to change roles and employers more frequently, and rapid development of technology is increasing the need for diversified skills.
We are operating globally, and our team consists of over 3000 maintenance experts who are located mainly in the Nordic countries, Central Europe and South America. We are training our team continuously to meet the customers’ need of diversified, skilled workers.
We are continuously and curiously finding new ways to meet the customers’ increasing competence demand. For example, in Finland we have started a Service Centre approach where we can support many customers within an area when they have the need for additional resources or expertise to manage a specific development project.
With our passion in the field of industrial maintenance, we can guarantee a challenging, creative, and rewarding workplace for current and future experts. That is one of the reasons we can confidently say that we are able to help manufacturing companies with the challenge of future competence supply.
