Maintenance Excellence at St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corp.

This Project was established to review all facets of Maintenance within the St Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation (SLSMC) with a goal to improve productivity, maintaining a positive impact on maintenance staff moral and provide the same or increased equipment reliability. Maintenance Programs were reviewed for all major assets and analyzed using subject matter experts leveraging the FMECA (Failure Mode, Effects & Criticality Analysis) tool to determine areas of vulnerability within the assets ability to perform at the designed operational level Maintenance Processes were analyzed using some of the Lean Six Sigma and Work Measurement tools with focus on the six (6) steps of Work Management Cycle (Identify, Plan, Schedule, Assign, Execute and Learn) to get a better understanding of the problem areas and generate solutions to this issue backed by actual results. Work Organization main focus was to improve Supervisory awareness and availability in providing support to trades employees and conducting regular field audits to ensure accuracy and quality of task execution. Investigations and work process flow analysis are also planned for individual Trade Shops and Warehouse Facility Layouts to improve work space planning and component/part inventories. Change Management focus was on Vision Mapping, Stakeholder Analysis, Communication Planning and transition coordination of all improvements and changes that will affect the entire organization during the progression of each stage of the project. The findings of the project to date showed that there were a lot of excess maintenance tasks being performed on managed assets. The estimated labour times for task completion, travel and delay inefficiencies of work tasks being performed were excessive and daily performed tasks contained value and non-value activities over all process steps of the Work Management Cycle. All findings discovered and work that continuous to be performed at each stage of this project confirms that there is a lot of variability, inefficiencies and opportunities for improvements within all facets of the Maintenance within the Organization.