Predict, Prevent, Cut down Expenses. ITPS Implements Proactive Maintenance and Repair Management Strategies in Kazakhstan

2020 was supposed to be a truly breakthrough year for industrial enterprises in Kazakhstan in terms of introducing digital innovations. Three years have passed since the approval of the Digital Kazakhstan national program, which defines the digital transformation of industry and the fuel and energy complex as one of the priority tasks. During this time, foreign best prectices have been studied, and road maps for the planned transition of business to digital processes have been developed. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent crisis required a revision of the defined strategies. Now the industrial sector of the country is looking for quick ways to achieve business effects that will help mitigating the consequences of the crisis and will ensure additional advantages on the market. One of these quick ways is to optimize costs by switching to a predictive model of process management and maintenance and repair activities. The ITPS Group of Companies is currently planning to implement several projects of this type in Kazakhstan.

Today, most industrial enterprises in Kazakhstan use planned maintenance and repair management models, which neither ensure effective prevention of incidents nor let the enterprises fully use the equipment potential. The interest to digitalization of the maintenance and repair processes increased due in no small part to the recent online event held by ITPS and OSIsoft called: Cut down expenses and increase reliability: effective approaches to maintenance and repair management, in which 25% of the audience were from Kazakhstan. During the event, the achieved business effects were presented on the example of the projects implemented by both Russian and foreign companies, together with the approaches to solving specific problems of industrial enterprises, which make it possible to quickly and efficiently solve the main tasks to cut down expenses and improve efficiency. 

ITPS has been operating in the Kazakhstan market for over 12 years, has a team of certified maintenance and repair experts and numerous cases of successful development of integration solutions with the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. Among the customers of ITPS are such companies as: National Company KazMunayGas JSC, KEGOC JSC, TURGAY-PETROLEUM JSC, Karakudukmunai LLP and Zhaikmunai LLP. The main share of the ITPS project implementation experience in this area lies in the development of integrated maintenance and repair systems for major oil and gas companies, metallurgical and chemical enterprises with extended equipment stock (about 130 thousand units) and high cost of shutdown. The key business results are the following: decreased downtime by 22%, less time to identify defects by 35%, reduced labor costs for equipment registration by 30% had been achieved within six months after the transition to proactive maintenance and repair strategies. At the same time, the number of planned repairs per equipment unit was reduced. One of the customers optimized them by more than 28% and therefore saved about $1 million in two years. The implementation of this approach in the transport industry helped a major federal transport operator to optimize a unit serving 112,000 rail cars.  A flexible system for railway cars repair was developed within the project, based on actual operating time (by mileage), considering the residual operation time and the classification of defects. The costs for planning and getting ready to repairs decreased by 40%, and the downtime of cars during repairs and waiting for the repairs went down by 20%. 

“Applying proactive maintenance and repair management strategies is necessary for all enterprises. The only question is which of the market players will be the first to take advantage of this approach. The predictive management model can be successfully combined with the optimization of reporting processes, logistics, reference data, with data from MES, ERP and other enterprise systems which makes the maintenance and repair unit unique. The obtained results have a complex effect – the more subsystems and data are included in the digital configuration, the more accurate is the analytics and the more efficient is the management. Our project implementation experience, as well as expertise with SAP, 1C, and OSIsoft products allows us to create intelligent and truly comprehensive tools, with the help of which the enterprise begins to work as a single coherent mechanism. We create conditions in which the desired economic effect is inevitable”, commented Leonid Tikhomirov, CEO of the ITPS Group of Companies.