Webinar recap: Part 1 Hot Stops

From our conversations with our Fiix community over the past couple of weeks, we know that many of you are experiencing different challenges as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to progress.

To help our Fiix users who are experiencing a production slowdown or full/partial shutdown, we developed a two-part webinar series, Hot Stops & Cold Starts, with the Fiix professional services team.

We opened the webinar with a quick audience poll, to get a sense of how many folks on the line were experiencing changes in production. 80% of webinar attendees were currently in full or partial shutdown mode with another 5% anticipating an impact on production in the near future.

If you’re currently in the same position, read on or watch the full webinar recap below. You don’t need to be a Fiix customer to get some useful information from our CMMS implementation experts.

More about our professional services experts

Steve Ricard, Implementation Team Manager

A Certified Facility Manager and Certified Reliability Leader, Steve has over 34 years of maintenance management experience and participates in a national speaking circuit for maintenance professionals.

Charles Rogers, Senior Implementation Consultant

Mechanical Engineer with over 33 years of training and field experience in maintenance & reliability, risk management and process safety management (OSHA PSM).

Summary & key recommendations

Steve and Charles share their industry expertise regarding shutdown & outage management best practices that you can also apply for emergency shutdowns and unplanned outages. To make sure you get the critical information you need right now, we’ve created the quick reference guide below, with timecodes of key recommendations and highlights from the webinar..

04:36: Charles talks about why it is important to improve shutdown & outage management using a systematic management approach.

05:57: Charles reviews the three basic approaches to managing shutdowns and why tight control is actually the most cost effective.

06:30: Charles covers the different types of outages and the roles and responsibilities required for successful shutdown management, including the importance of a shutdown coordinator role.

07:36: Charles reviews some of the checklists required during a shutdown and gives practical examples of how you can use your Fiix CMMS to manage this work, including:

• Utilization of a shutdown work order type for planning and execution
• Creating an event trigger where all shutdown planning and execution work orders can be grouped together
• Attaching files such as checklists, procedures, drawings and safety documents to your shutdown work orders
• Creating a shutdown task group for repetitive tasks
• Generating shutdown reports

Our second audience poll reveals that 77% of attendees are not currently using their CMMS to capture shutdown work and Steve opens up a Fiix demo environment to show tips & tricks of how Fiix users can use their CMMS to better manage this work.

11:30: Steve starts by demonstrating how to change the work order type and use color-coding to easily identify different work order types in Fiix. He then provides the following key recommendations for SMs during an unplanned shutdown, such as COVID-19:

1. Have your work orders generate, regardless of whether you are going to be doing the work.
2. Create a status in the control of Closed called “Incomplete COVID-19” and use this status for all work orders that generate during the shutdown that are not completed.
3. Attach relevant shutdown documents to the files tab of the work order.
4. Use widgets to create a custom shutdown dashboard

14:46: A member of the audience asks if there is an issue with simply pausing SMs. Steve explains the benefits from a reporting and auditing point of view of letting your work orders generate per their schedule and changing the status to Closed “Incomplete COVID-19”.

16:36: A member of the audience asks if they can change the status of multiple work orders at the same time and Steve demonstrates how to do this in the Fiix demo environment.

18:30: Steve covers the two main strategies for time-based scheduling, fixed and float, and explains how to adjust fixed interval schedules for outages greater than 14 days and less than 1 year by editing the trigger “Start On” date field for effected SM using the following formulas:

• 24:00: SMs that will release during your shutdown period and you will not be completing the work:
  1. Last Release Date – Facility Close Date = Next Due Days
  2. Next Due Days + Facility Reopen Date = New Release Date

• 25:55: SMs that will not release during your shutdown period but you want to ignore the time that the equipment was not running during the shutdown:
  1. Facility Reopen Date – Facility Close Date = Next Due Days
  2. Next Due Days + Next Release Date = New Release Date

29:33: Charles reiterates that emergency & unplanned shutdowns and outages can utilize the same strategic approach as planned outages. He also advises that using the tools in your CMMS that Steve demonstrated can help set you up for a successful restart.

31:54: Charles is asked to provide more details on the responsibilities of a shutdown coordinator by a member of the audience.

33:04: A member of the audience asks how best to prepare for an emergency shutdown and Steve goes back into the Fiix demo environment to show how a shutdown event trigger can quickly generate pre-populated shutdown work orders.

36:30: Fiix user, Prisciliano, asks Steve to also show how to create the event that would trigger scheduled maintenance tasks and Steve goes into a deeper demonstration of the key steps:

1. Create your event type, eg. shutdown
2. Create your SM and apply that event type to the SM
3. When the event occurs, open your asset record and flag that event as having occurred, to generate your work order.

40:22: A member of the audience asks if they can make these adjustments retroactively because their facility is closed and they did not make any of these adjustments before leaving. Steve explains that you should be able to access your Fiix CMMS anywhere in the world where you have internet access but also explains more about potential firewalls and VPN access.

42:20: Following a question from the audience, Charles & Steve speak to how proper shutdown planning can improve morale.

45:30: Promo for Part 2: Cold Starts with Fiix user, Brandon De Melo, Manufacturing Engineer and CMMS Coordinator for a leading global automotive supplier, including the key topics that will be discussed in this webinar.