Helping a generation business unit optimize preventive maintenance projects during an outage

Background

A generation business unit was planning the maintenance outage scope for its nuclear plant and had an extensive list of Preventive Maintenance projects as candidates for inclusion in the outage plan. Given the high cost of having the plant offline for maintenance work, the generation business unit was considering Preventive Maintenance Optimization (PMO) to optimize the number of Preventive Maintenance projects (PM) undertaken at its nuclear plant during the outage. Knowing that many PMO efforts are challenging to perform, lack the bases to change PM labor burdens and may even create more PM work orders, the generation business unit reached out to MCR for help.

Solution

MCR used our proprietary categorization approach based on management’s ability to influence the scope and/or schedule of each PM. Our categorization approach incorporated documented requirements, evidence of asset performance plus consideration of risk attributed to scope and schedule determinations.

All PMs were reviewed as if no frequency currently existed, establishing a recommended frequency for the very first time. PMs were grouped according to the plant equipment hierarchy where possible with operational consideration given to every PM. MCR then made recommendations based on our risk-informed methodology where consideration was given to the probability of an adverse consequence as an outcome of establishing PM scope and periodicity. All information was presented and reviewed in workshops with Engineering asset owners to identify any special circumstances for any PM.

Results

The project produced a matrix of all PMs in outage scope with current PM information and other valuable data including:

• Categorization of each PM based on management’s ability to influence scope or schedule
• Potential consequence related to reducing the PM burden
• Probability of the consequence occurring
• Information sources and references supporting recommendations
• Measure of Engineering support for each recommendation

The project discovered information necessary to establish proper PM scope and schedule and fostered ownership of PM recommendations by the individual asset owners. The combination of improved labor estimates reducing overall labor cost plus condition-based adjustments of PM next due dates identified potential savings of more than $2M for a single maintenance/refueling outage.