Our Managing Director Bruno was in Tunisia the third week of April for business development meetings with our African partners. The trip started with a visit to the scenic town of Sidi Bou Said for a seafood lunch with colleagues Adel Kalai and Claude Tombu, two of the key people behind the company’s development in Africa. On the way from Tunis to Sidi Bou Said, several Siveco client sites are visible, including power plants operated by the national power company STEG (Societe Tunisienne de l’Electricite et du Gaz).

This months tips & tricks covers the powerful “personalisation” tools of Coswin, which we use to simply the user interface of the system and prove to be immensely valuable for projects in China, where many maintenance staff may have never used a CMMS before. Customers can make further use of those tools to modify or improve their user interface in the future, without involvement from Siveco.

Siveco China currently manages nine CMMS projects for gas turbine power plants owned by Algerian power generation group Sonelgaz. As two of the projects (Ain Arnat 1,200MW Combined Cycle Power Plant, built by Hyundai Engineering, and Boufarik 750MW Simple Cycle Power Plant), built by GAMA, are entering final delivery, Siveco conducted training at the EPC locations in Seoul, Korea and Istanbul, Turkey. For the two projects, the next activity is Site Acceptance Test (SAT) in Algeria.

Experience has shown that the earlier reliability and maintainability are taken into account in a construction project, the better. These should be specifically addressed from the design stage of a project, as illustrated below. This approach, which consists in paying more attention to maintenance earlier in the project, to reduce future operation cost, differs markedly from that of Chinese engineering and construction companies.

Indeed, we observe our business has picked up during Q1 2016, as more companies finally start to pay attention to optimizing assets utilization and maintenance. More and more customers show interest in our ROI-driven approach, combining specialist maintenance consulting services and Maintenance 4.0 technology.

Too many people confuse Planning and Scheduling, two related but different processes. In this brief article, we would like to clarify the difference between the two.