Severstal Reduces Unscheduled Maintenance Delays by 20% with Asset Performance Management

Background

Severstal is one of the world's leading vertical integrated steel and steel-related mining companies, with approximately 50,000 employees. Severstal has assets in Russia, Belarus, Latvia, Poland, Italy, and Liberia. In 2015, Severstal's crude steel production reached 11.45 million tons. To successfully maintain facilities and employees across various locations, Severstal’s business is built on five core values: safety, customer care, respect, teamwork, and efficiency. 

Severstal identifies several challenges to address

In 2012, Severstal conducted a reliability and maintenance assessment of its maintenance practices and assets to identify critical areas for improvement. The company identified various challenges, including limited integration between production and maintenance, lack of a reliability culture, and minimal emphasis on maintenance and schedule planning among engineers. That same year, Severstal initiated an internal project called Organization Efficiency in Maintenance and Repair to define principles for the reorganization of its maintenance and repair business.

Aligning Severstal’s business objectives with Predix APM capabilities

Severstal recognized that Predix Asset Performance Management (Predix APM) (formerly Meridium Enterprise APM) provided the tools strongly aligned with the principles of Severstal’s  Organization Efficiency in Maintenance and Repair project. With the help of Maintex consultants, who provide a full range of services for asset strategy and solution implementation, the Predix APM team performed an in-depth design of its solution to align with Severstal’s needs, while also establishing a solid foundation for sustainable development in the future.

Severstal adopted strategy development, asset criticality analysis, and strategy assessment capabilities, and it used SAP Work Manager with SAP Multi Resource Scheduling for planning and scheduling activities. As a large company, Severstal already had massive quantities of historical data in SAP – around 1.5 million records of functional locations and equipment units, 10 million records of work history, more than 300,000 task lists of repetitive operations, and more than 35,000 measurement points. 

With such huge volumes of data, Severstal relied on Maintex and the Predix APM consultants to seamlessly integrate data from SAP, prioritize data from critical assets, and develop strategic recommendations for maintenance. Predix APM helped Severstal automate its reliability processes and develop asset strategies for Operational Excellence and training to engage all employees in the reliability and maintenance processes.

Completing criticality analysis and reducing unscheduled maintenance delays

Using Predix APM, Severstal analyzed the existing condition of its maintenance system, created a solution design, completed module and integration testing, trained 390 users and administrators, installed software packages to the users' personal computers, tested six pilot machines, and completed a criticality analysis of 17,000 machines with distribution by risk levels.

From 2013 to 2015, Severstal reduced its unscheduled maintenance delays for core equipment by 20%, which was particularly helpful as the company also reduced its maintenance budget and personnel. Severstal has also developed an extended roadmap for Predix APM implementation and plans to adopt the reliability analysis, spare parts analysis, and product cost accounting capabilities as well.