Improving Reliability Through Asset Optimization at a Global Life Sciences Company

Overview

A global life sciences company needed help optimizing an entire suite of assets for one of their vial filling lines located at one of their US sites. Asset optimization would improve their equipment reliability and reduce maintenance downtime and positively impact their production capacity. The company connected with SEAM Group—a global leader in reliability expertise and resources—to perform the optimization work, which resulted in giving over 750 hours back to production, a significant improvement! SEAM Group also collaborated with the company and conducted a follow on maintenance workshop with the goal of developing a maintenance schedule that protected a thirty-hour window for conducting maintenance and calibration PMs.

Situation

Using one of their US sites as a pilot, the company had requested asset optimization services for one of their vial filling lines. But, performing the services wouldn’t be enough for them to consider the work a success. They wanted to ensure the optimization process would yield significant results. The company had fairly aggressive goals to achieve to maximize uptime production throughput, which included reducing intervention time by at least 30% and decreasing scheduled maintenance downtime to 30 hours a month.

Solution

In partnering with the company, SEAM Group’s reliability team identified 13 unique assets and performed PM optimization services on each. After the optimization work was completed, 19 different assets were recorded as affected. As part of the process, job plans were developed with help from the company’s team of operators, maintenance, support, engineering, and admin resources.

These job plans were then shared with all the necessary stakeholders at a planning workshop. In the planning workshop, key stakeholders built their maintenance schedule to minimize maintenance downtime, improve asset performance, and position the site to improve production runtime. Additionally, the workshop discussed the future state of PMs in terms of executing work to develop a sustainable process for the long term.

Results

SEAM Group helped the company exceed the goals they had mapped out during initial conversations by providing exceptional results. Before optimization services were performed, original PMs recorded 1270 hours of planned downtime a month. With optimization, 757 production hours were given back to the company. SEAM Group improved the company’s maintenance strategies by removing the nonvalue-added tasks that significantly reduced time to execute PMs.

The company also appreciated SEAM Group’s partnership and approach to doing business. The optimization process may not have had such outstanding results if SEAM Group’s team did not have the skillset that understands life sciences assets nor have the expert reliability engineering resources to guide and deliver the process.

While work completed in the third quarter of 2020, there are conversations for expanding reliability services to the company’s global community.