Three Things I Learned from the 2014 GOMaximo Conference

“This is the place to be,” were the first words I heard when walking through the lobby for the 2014 GOMaximo conference in Houston. I, myself, said these same words to multiple people I met at the conference who were either new to Maximo or planning on implementing Maximo.

For anyone that is not aware, GOMaximo is the Oil and Gas Maximo user group that allows sectors like Exploration, Production, Pipeline, Transportation, Chemicals, Drilling, and Oilfield Services to get together to share their experiences and get to know others facing the same challenges.

The conference and training sessions lasted for 3 days and offered a number of ways to gain new information on Maximo. Whether through presentations, lunches, coffee breaks, or the Texas Hold’em Tournament, knowledge was constantly being shared. Although I’ve taken away many key points, I’ll try to share the 3 most important things I’ve learned from this year’s conference.

Ask yourself, “What equipment will fail next year?”

The President of Net Results gave the Keynote titled “Achieving the Future Perfect Asset Through the Ultimate Maintenance System.” He talked about how people usually don’t know when equipment will fail and often ask, “When will this equipment fail?” Because people don’t know when equipment will fail, they do preventative work that makes their equipment fail. This preventative work is often based on a certain frequency and doesn’t use the data that the equipment may be providing, making the equipment fail before it should. When an OXY employee was asked, “When will this equipment fail?” by her boss, she was determined to find an answer. This OXY employee started a Work Management Improvement project that helped OXY improve they way they conducted their work. This project led to a better question to ask: “What equipment will fail next year?” Not knowing the answer to that question should be motivation for everyone who is working with Reliability and Maintenance or Work Management systems to have a better understanding of what equipment is due to fail in the following year.

We live in a data world

Prairie State Generating Company’s Planning Manager gave a talk about the importance of data structure and its governance. He stated, “If you can’t classify it, you won’t be able to report it.” The speaker spoke about how his company became more efficient in their data improvement activities. In order to cleanse and enrich their data, Prairie State Generating Company had to adopt a standard, which, in their case, was PIDX. Many presentations focused on metrics and KPIs rather than data, but there was usually a brief mention in each presentation on the importance of good data.

Get more out of Maximo

Every year, the Maximo for O&G Roadmap is part of the agenda. This event is a great opportunity to learn about new developments and functions that aren’t being utilized by organizations. Although this was not a discussion about Maximo “out of the box” utility, there were many conversations regarding Maximo mobility. A couple of Enbridge’s team members held a great talk on “Maximizing Maximo.” They covered the end-to-end process of their Maximo mobility implementation and explained the best practices for choosing the right hardware to choosing the right Maximo modules.