Q&A
Corner
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Q&A
Corner
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As time permits, we will answer general questions that are sent to us and then post the answers on our website. To keep the response to a reasonable length, we typically have to make some assumptions. If you are looking for a more detailed answer to a question, please contact our main office. Our question this month comes from a petrochemical refinery in east Texas, who asked the following question – “We are currently implementing a number of CMMS applications across multiple sites, and there is much discussion regarding whether we should implement all sites and all applications together, or phase them in by application, site, or both. What would you recommend?” We rarely recommend phasing in applications unless you are resource constrained in terms of project personnel. With most commercially available CMMS, EAM, and ERP systems, the applications will be configured differently depending on which other applications are in the mix. Putting these into production one at a time, or without giving due consideration to configuration of the whole, you’ll generally wind up revisiting and reworking the configuration of applications previously placed into production. This in turn has ramifications on training, and makes Quality Assurance Testing all the more complex.What we have done in cases where the ‘elephant’ was too big to implement as a whole is to look at the inter-dependencies between applications, and divide the applications into two or three (at most) blocks of applications where re-work and re-training will be minimized. We also seek to align the applications with the strategic issues and objectives of the organization we’re working with, and establish application implementation priorities accordingly. The third thing that we look for are those applications which are easily rolled out, which are easily used, which will be used by the largest block of end users, and which will advance the overall end user understanding of the systems use (i.e.; navigation, menu structures, etc.). This minimizes subsequent training, and can lead to significant savings with subsequent application implementation. As far as phasing the implementation across sites is concerned, we generally favor that. Considerations here include the availability of training staff to support each roll-out, and the funds available for stretching the implementation out. Our typical approach here is to find one to three facilities or sites where the plant management are champions of the implementation effort first of all. Also look for low numbers of end users the first time out, and treat these facilities as something of a pilot or proof of concept implementation. Try to involve the personnel at these facilities as much as possible in the implementation. Build each of the implementation roll-outs into your plan, so you don’t have a series of decision points with each group of facilities in terms of whether to go forward or not. We normally allow one to two months between roll-outs, but making the first roll-out as flawless as possible is critical. If there are a lot of issues in these first few facilities, you may not get to continue on to the remaining sites. Thanks for the great question. Over the coming months we’ll be generating a whitepaper on this topic to provide you with some additional thoughts, but these should help. |
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