Evaluation Of Maintenance Management Through Benchmarking In Geothermal Power Plants
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Disclaimer: This article is a thesis writing/review on the topic, “Evaluation of Maintenance Management through Benchmarking in Geothermal Power Plants”.
Researcher: M. A. A.
Introduction:
Around 1976, the modern version of benchmarking began with competitive benchmarking. This processwas used by Xerox, who compared itself with its competitors in order to determine how to maximize productivityand minimize costs.The results of their benchmarking found that several of their processes were inferior to that of their competitors in terms of product quality, rework, and speed of production. Benchmarking helped Xerox identify their weak points and make changes to improve their company. Then, many companies in the 1980’s used process benchmarking to seek ideas for improved processes outside their usual competition or industry. Recently, benchmarking has crossed all industrial lines (Walker, 2005).
Benchmarking is the continuous search for and adaptation of significantly better practices that lead to superior performance by investigating the performance and practices of other organizations. Benchmarking makes it possible to gain a competitive advantage over the competition. To gain this advantage, companies use several types of benchmarking (Walker, 2005). They include strategicbenchmarking, competitive benchmarking, process benchmarking, functional benchmarking, internal benchmarking, external benchmarking, and international benchmarking.
In a typical benchmarking study, the information contained in a benchmark or a comparative measure of processes or results performance is used to establish which organization is a candidate for “best practice” for a particular business process. Then the business process must be specified in detail to understand how the benchmark result was achieved and to determine which specific activities enabled the successful performance. Finally, learning must be customized to apply new knowledge to organizations that have not attained the level of best performer.
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Benchmarking is not just a checklist or set of numbers that are used to make management feel better about their current performance. Benchmarking really should make management uncomfortable due to the identification of gaps in business performance. Benchmarking should challenge management due to the discovery of performance enablers that could help them to improve (Watson, 2008). For geothermal power plants to stay competitive, they also implement similar strategies to optimize their resources. This thesis deals with the evaluation of maintenance management through benchmarking in geothermal power plants.
To learn from leading organizations and indicate the implementation approach, this thesis looked at the use of benchmarking approaches for evaluating maintenance management and comparing performance indicators. Maintenance planning and activities have grown dramatically in importance across many industries. This importance is manifested by both the significant material resources allocated to maintenance departments as well as by the substantial number of personnel involved in maintenance activities in companies. For example, in most geothermal power plants over a quarter of the total workforce in the process industry is said to deal with maintenance work. This situation, coupled with an increasingly competitive environment, creates economic pressures and a heightened need to ensure that these considerable maintenance resources are allocated and used appropriately, as they can be significant drivers of competitiveness.
The maintenance of a geothermal plant is also very dependent on local factors, namely, the geothermal system, location, weather, and climate (Thorolfsson, 2005a). These unique conditions pushed the maintenance community to think about how to choose the best maintenance methods. Most geothermal power plants follow combined types of maintenance methods and strategy. Different maintenance methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. The study discusses different types of maintenance management and approaches, and their application in geothermal power plants. This thesis outlines a ‘process-step approach’ to maintenance benchmarking of geothermal power plants, which can help identify the key performance indicators and, based on that, to develop a maintenance performance benchmarking model. The benchmarking model was then examined and an analysis made using two Icelandic geothermal power plants, as a best performer and benchmarked power plant.
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Key Findings
Benchmarking is, by its very nature, a diagnostic tool for managing an organization’s resources.
While it provides insights and perspectives on the performance of an individual power plant compared with other similar or best performing plants, it does not provide specific answers for the best way to improve performance at a specific facility. On the other hand, power plants that properly implement benchmarking can stay innovative and competitive with their respective partners. Geothermal power plants must use benchmarking in an ethical way so that competitors are willing to share information freely. If the information is shared, power plants can benefit from their benchmark studies. With this perspective in mind, this thesis has reached the following conclusions:
Benchmarking is a very useful tool. Properly applied, you can gain great insight into the processes that yield the results you wish to achieve. However, a properly executed benchmark project is not simple or quick. It requires careful preparation, analysis, and execution.
Systematic maintenance data collection, analysis and a continued reliability study can provide valuable information about plant performance. The results greatly depend on the quality of the data. Data collection and analysis is an extremely important phase of the entire benchmarking project.
Such a model can assist power plant management to understand the current performance of the plant, helps to take actions for reaching and surpassing identified business standards, can improve performance, set specific goals, take appropriate actions, and measure results against the benchmarks.
The model also gives a basic idea and information for further improvement to minimize the performance gap between their own and best performers.
Benchmarks are not the end-all. A benchmark performance does not remain a standard for long. Continuous improvement must be the goal.
Benchmarking is the practice of being open enough to admit that someone else is better at something, and being wise enough to learn to be as good as/or even better than them. Benchmarking can drive performance to the next level by setting goals and surpassing them through a learning process from the best practice.
Summary
In today’s competitive energy market, many power plants are increasing their competitiveness by adopting new operating and maintenance philosophies to reduce their Operation and Maintenance(O&M) costs. Comparing performance among geothermal plants is difficult, as each power plant works within a unique context of resource, physical plant settings, and organizational goals. However, benchmarking provides indicators that allow us to examine individual circumstances and performances within groups of similarly-sized power plants. As geothermal power plants are baseload stations, the role of maintenance management to improve equipment reliability and plant availability is very important. In recent practice, power plants have started using benchmarking to identify the best practices for enhancing their maintenance management. This research involved using benchmarking for maintenance management of geothermal power plants and developing a comprehensive model which can help to compare maintenance performance. The model helped in the search for optimum methods of maintenance management practices in order to improve the overall effectiveness of operation and maintenance. Appropriately, by adopting the best practices, benchmarking could help geothermal plants to become more cost-effective in maintenance.
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