Integrated Operational Management in Maximo Nuclear

Body

Operational management – tying together the efforts of the distinct functional areas to achieve overall business goals – is an important part in most businesses.  Integrated operational management in commercial nuclear power stations is a mandated essential.

Operational management in nuclear power means that intense scrutiny is applied to all activities with the potential to affect the safe and reliable operation of the plant.  The scrutiny takes the form of thorough consideration before, during, and following the activity.  The consideration is owned by licensed personnel charged with directing the operation of the plant, and actively supported by all the colleague nuclear professionals performing the plant activities.

Figure 1: Nuclear Solution process support extends core Maximo EAM capabilities

Clearances in Maximo Nuclear are one of several examples of integrated operational management functionality in Maximo Nuclear.  Clearances completely replace core Maximo’s Lockout/Tagout app.  Clearances provide significant additional capabilities and support the enhanced planning and dynamic controls appropriate to the complex nuclear power environment.  Clearances also plainly illustrate the advantage of providing integrated operational management as part of the enterprise asset management capabilities within Maximo Nuclear. In contrast to external operational management systems, Maximo Clearances offer robust user intercommunications; Work, Asset and operational data sharing; simplified user roles and security; and comprehensive real time information access. 

Maximo Clearances identify a physical protection boundary; define a scope of protected work; and establish the accountability and administrative control of the plant’s clearance process.

• The protection boundary identifies how plant components are to be repositioned, and how to discharge or remove energy present within systems that are to be breached, opened, maintained, or tested.
• Work scope is defined by relating Work Orders to the Clearance.
• Accountability and process controls are established through the industry best practices embedded within Maximo Nuclear business processes.

Several available external clearance systems provide some level of capabilities in these three areas; nevertheless only Maximo Nuclear combines industry best practices and full functionality for clearances complemented with the integrated communications and full information access available within a single application suite.  Maximo Clearances capabilities:

• Maximo provides the single source of validated data for all work management details – of the WO, of the clearance, and all process statuses within each.
• Allows relating template clearances to multiple PMs, then generate and group the PMWOs onto a single working clearance during the WOGEN run.
• Provides user appropriate views of clearance and work related information, controlled by the application in use and that user’s security profile.
• Access to critical approvals are fully separated by security profiles.
• Clearances are part of Maximo Nuclear Functional Equipment Group (FEG) planning and controls.
• Allow the Shift Supervisor to “take credit” for clearance positioning on operations lineups.
• Provide an option to use required component positions in plant procedures as the source of clearance restoration positions.
• Identify if the plant is entering plant Tech Spec conditions or incurring equipment unavailability when the clearance is hung.
• When necessary, allow initiating a plant Condition Report directly from the clearance, and automatically carry over designated information to the Corrective Action program.
• Advanced configuration capabilities allow more than a dozen process-level clearance options to be adjusted to suit worldwide clearance process variations while maintaining full operational control.