1st February, 2002

seminar held in st lucia shows how to solve maintenance issues

A seminar was held at the Rendezvous Hotel this week to show how organizations can solve maintenance problems and reduce maintenance costs in hotels and commercial buildings.

The St Lucia Hotel and Tourism Association (SLHTA) and the Association of Professional Engineers of St Lucia jointly promoted this unique event, which was attended by 40 delegates from senior management representing 26 local organizations, including hotels, banks, commercial businesses, government departments and the Sir Arthur Lewis College. Rodinald Soomer, Executive Vice President of the SLHTA, said he was delighted to support such an event, as there was a real need for local organizations of all kinds to address issues of maintenance costs. Mr. Edmonds, President of the Association of Professional Engineers, was keen for his members to attend.

The featured speaker for the seminar, Daniel Ough - Director of Engineering for Le Sport and Rendezvous Hotel (TRMC), was introduced by Julian Ayres, General Manager of Rendezvous Hotel. Mr Ayres stated that Mr Ough has had over 20 years experience in setting up and managing computer based planned maintenance programs, which he introduced to Rendezvous 18 months ago. Mr Ayres reported that there have been dramatic benefits from the program, including a significant reduction in equipment breakdowns, and a 50 percent reduction in non-productive time of the maintenance team.

Mr Ough gave a lively and informative lecture on planned preventative maintenance. His message was that managing an efficient and cost effective maintenance program is within the grasp of all managers. He explained that planned preventative maintenance makes good economic sense, as there are considerable cost benefits when plant and equipment of companies operate at their optimum efficiency and last for their design life. When plant or equipment is maintained properly, the frequency of breakdowns is reduced, resulting in far fewer complaints. Breakdowns cost money, both directly through the actual cost of the repair and indirectly through lost revenue when a facility, such as a production line or a bedroom block, is taken out of service.

Mr Ough examined some of the reasons why companies did not have planned maintenance systems. Lack of understanding of the benefit was high on the list. He explained there had to be a commitment at senior management level to make a planned maintenance system work. The cost of setting up a system was also raised as an obstacle by some, but he pointed out that this concern was ill founded, as the benefits considerably outweigh the costs. As an example, the cost of introducing the computer based planned maintenance program at the Rendezvous Hotel was 0.6% of the annual maintenance budget spread over 3 years, with the resulting savings being many times this amount.

Mr Ough outlined the components of the planned maintenance program at Rendezvous as an example. There were over 1000 items of plant and equipment on the asset register, 800 maintenance tasks and around 500 requests for maintenance each month. He considered that the only way that this could effectively be managed was by a computer based planned maintenance program. In 1998, following a study of the best programs on the market, he introduced IMPACTxp software. This has been very successful as it is very user friendly and has been accepted by senior management and the maintenance team alike. National Insurance Scheme (St Lucia) and St Lucia Distillers are now introducing it, as they have seen first hand the benefits of IMPACTxp. There are already several other companies in St Lucia showing interest in this highly successful and unique product, which has been used internationally in hotels, banks, commercial companies and manufacturing industries for around 10 years.

An executive from the software company Matrix Resource Management Ltd (UK), gave an excellent presentation of the IMPACTxp planned maintenance product using the actual database from the hotel. Their disarming and convincing approach undoubtedly came from the fact that they had been a user of IMPACTxp for 4 years before joining the company. The product has been installed by companies in many parts of the world, including Europe, South Africa, Australia, USA and North America and is proving to be highly successful with companies in St Lucia. Matrix engineers were in St Lucia to install the IMPACTxp system at the National Insurance Scheme and St. Lucia Distillers and to train local staff to operate the system. The Sir Arthur Lewis College had offered their extensive computer training facilities so that over 20 local staff could receive a two-day training course on the software.

Matrix's introduction was followed by an “on line” demonstration on the IMPACTxp system. By using a simple reporting module on the software, a full range of information was readily at hand. This included how many items were on the asset register, how many work orders for maintenance were raised last month, how many work orders were still incomplete and how many calls were made to the Help Desk. Each breakdown was logged with a fault code and when the work was finished the information was archived. A simple instruction to the computer brought up graphs showing the actual numbers of faults for each code for any given period. It was quite easy to see where the main problems were and where attention was needed.

Matrix showed how to find out the split between the planned maintenance and breakdowns. Last month the hotel achieved the rate of 60%-planned maintenance. Matrix explained that although the hotel target was 70% planned, this was a remarkable achievement. As an interesting footnote, Matrix confirmed that before IMPACTxp was introduced there was only 20% of the work at the hotel that was planned. There seemed to be no end to what the IMPACTxp could report on, although the most useful information seemed to be the labor utilization of the maintenance team, or for that matter any team member. The message of this seminar was very clear: planned preventative maintenance makes sense. It is within the grasp of all managers and a computer based maintenance system is essential. Rendezvous Hotel endorsed the IMPACTxp system and was clearly pleased to be having a joint presentation at this seminar.

In his closing remarks, Mr Ough said that help for those wanting to introduce planned maintenance is here in St Lucia. TRMC, the head office consulting division of Rendezvous and Le Sport Hotel, is prepared to provide advice and support to companies in all aspects of maintenance, including the introduction of planned maintenance and installation of IMPACTxp software.