Proactive maintenance across 4 continents

GE’s Consultative Services was introduced in 2007 and has already been adopted by nine customers in 16 locations, including Algeria, Nigeria, Venezuela, Norway, Egypt and the USA.
Consultative Services is a proactive, systematic approach to assessing maintenance and inventory management programs, and determining all critical issues and opportunities. The objective is to define the most effective maintenance parameters for minimizing downtime and maximizing reliability and availability.

This service draws on GE’s design knowledge and experience as an original equipment manufacturer, supported by our unmatched archive of performance-based data gained from decades of monitoring and analyzing the operation of thousands of installed units worldwide. Each consultation project involves a task force consisting of a Program Manager, a GE Master Level Field Engineer (~30 years experience), an Asset Engineer (~10 years experience) and appropriate technicians, plus analytical support from GE’s iCenter team in Florence.

A structured process

Kick-off meeting: The GE Program Manager and the customer’s operations and maintenance manager identify issues and opportunities of critical importance to the successful implementation of the project.

Site survey: GE’s task force members visit the site and review all operational performance data, plant records and previous maintenance activities for the past 24-36 months. Task force members are hand-picked for each specific project, drawing on more than 1,000 experienced engineers, as required, to supplement the base team.
Inventory evaluation: A comprehensive review of the customer’s existing stock is conducted to ensure that all critical replacement parts and equipment are available on site. During this step, we work with the site Materials Manager to identify additional requirements, and to align and optimize the stock for the site assets.

Activity evaluation: The GE team reviews all planned maintenance activities with key site leaders, sharing all processes and knowledge along the way. A full as-is description of the plant is compiled and potential gaps that could jeopardize reliability, and availability are identified.

Data analysis: All data gathered from the site is transferred to our Florence headquarters where it is analyzed in the context of GE’s extensive database and best practice benchmarking from thousands of machines installed worldwide.

Final report: The consultative report presents all findings, identifies alternatives and recommends maintenance best practices as well as those upgrades which can improve the availability and reliability of the plant and, hence, increase the plant performance. It includes: all data; technical issues; inventory status and recommendations; an optimized maintenance approach; plus parts inter-changeability and upgrade recommendations tailored to the specific site conditions.

Consultative Services means close collaboration between GE Oil & Gas Global Services and our Customer during each step of the process. Shared discussion and open dialogue characterize the program from kick-off to presentation of findings and recommendations. Consultative Services is both strategic and tactical, identifying short, medium and long-term maintenance objectives and defining practical implementation strategies for all assets involved. Once the initial consultation phase has been completed, the task force and customer team typically remain in close communication - undertaking a critical outage management assessment 6-8 months before a scheduled maintenance activity in order to optimize planned tasks and parts availability. This proactive approach has been shown to reduce maintenance downtime, and in the case of a maintenance service implementation, such as Modular exchange, this reduction can reach as much as 40-50%.