PetStar, the world largest food-grade PET recycling plant is the second plant in the world to achieve IDCON’s World Class Reliability and Maintenance Status. IDCON defines World Class when a plant achieves a score above 75; PetStar achieved a rating of 78.8.
Mr Bernardo Salazar, Director of Operations, attributes a 2% increase in production as a result of the implementation of improvement initiatives identified after two previous IDCON Current Best Practices assessments.
IDCON’s Current Best Practices for reliability and maintenance (CBP) assessment rates 204 well-defined reliability and maintenance elements (RME) as to how well they are documented and, more importantly, how well they are executed. The RMEs are part of following key best practices processes:
- Leadership and organization, Preventive Maintenance, Work Management, Root Cause Problem Elimination, Skills development, Facilities, Tools and workshops, Technical Database, and Stores management and Engineering interface with maintenance.
The assessment has been performed in over 200 plants worldwide and only two plants have achieved a rating over 75. A food processing plant in New Zealand achieved 78.2 in 2008 and now PetStar. This assessment is very thorough, and depending on the size of the maintenance organization, it requires 1 – 3 senior consultants spending more than a week to do the assessment.
Christer Idhammar, IDCON’s founder and CEO stated that some of the keys to PetStar’s success in achieving the World Class status included:
- Visual and engaged long-term leadership. PetStar’s CEO Mr Jaime Camara showed engaged interest and participated in exit presentations of all assessments.
- Engaged, competent and enthusiastic employees
- Well defined and executed best practices
Furthermore, visual examples of best practices were observed during the assessment. Some visual examples included:
- Equipment modified and designed for maintainabilities such as the ability to inspect and safe access and lifting of equipment.
- Motors, gears, pumps and other rotating equipment kept as spares in store rotated on set intervals.
- Delivery and staging of parts and tools for planned work in designated areas.
- Using applicable tools for condition monitoring.
- Root Cause Problem Elimination executed with well-defined triggers. Elimination of any problem that meets a trigger is done on the plant floor often same-day as the problem is triggered.