Maintenance Program Performance – It Is Just A Phase You Are Going Through

by Terrence O'Hanlon, Publisher and CEO Reliabilityweb.com and Uptime Magazine

You may have your own idea of the phases that an organization goes through as they drive reliability improvements and you may not know mine yet, but you will if you keep reading.

The point is not what my vision of high-performance maintenance phases are; the point is for you to recognize your own organization and to keep moving to the highest level.

Babies to children to teenagers to adults to senior citizens is just one of the phases we can describe to relate to the human condition.  Phase identification allows us to create a better understanding by generalizing various descriptions attached to each category.

No one is born knowing how to create high-performance maintenance programs.   The good news is that there are volumes of maintenance books written, a few high-quality, professionally managed maintenance conferences and trainings to attend, excellent maintenance magazines to subscribe to and a world of maintenance oriented web sites to learn from.

Some useful things I think I have discovered as I became familiar with hundreds of maintenance programs over the past 30 years are:

• The tactics and tools of high-performance maintenance are documented and well known
•  The strategies for reaching high-performance in maintenance are documented and well known
•  Once you have deployed basic tools, tactics and strategies there is another critical element that will determine the performance level of the maintenance program

Maintenance Program Development Phases

Although I agree with the traditional maintenance program phase description of reactive to preventive to predictive to reliability-based to asset health management, I want to look at things from a slightly different angle.

Survival Phase
With no investment in tools, tactics or training many organizations find themselves in “Survival Mode”.  There is not a master plan or formal movement toward creating a more reliable operating environment.  These programs are highly reactive and everything revolves around ensuring operations gets back to production mode as quickly as possible after the inevitable breakdowns occur.  Many “repairs” do not last long, however no one is formally tracking failures so repeat problems will be accepted as “what’s so”.    Maintenance leaders and team members simply work to survive each shift and understand that the plant manager and operations managers set the priorities and are the masters they must serve; regardless of lack of vision they demonstrate toward increasing performance.  In this phase maintenance is often held responsible (blamed) for most of the breakdowns.  In the Survival phase it is every man/woman for them selves.

Common Sense Phase

Often times organizations will luck into adding a maintenance leader to the team who can apply enough common sense to find ways to avoid the worst repetitive failures in spite of the lack of tools, technologies or a master strategy.   The Plant Manager and Operations Manager do no embrace this common sense approach, they simply adapt their expectations to the new normal.  If there is a measurable result from the common sense approach, it is usually claimed by operations.  Common sense maintenance leaders tend to prefer to avoid the spotlight anyway.  Common sense maintenance leaders are greatly admired by the other maintenance team members who are happy to be out of Survival Mode.

Tools and Tactics Phase

When a Sales Representative brings in an Ultrasonic Detector for a demonstration, jaws drop and hearts skip a beat.   The team is excited and can see the value in expanding their senses to detect potential problems way before they could by using human senses alone.  The same holds true for vibration analysis, electric motor testing, oil analysis and infrared thermal imaging.

The problem I sometimes see is that many organizations simply add these “predictive” tools and the inspections tasks associated with them, on top of a reactive or preventive maintenance program.  They do not have a failure prevention or defect elimination strategy so a shot gun approach is taken and with enough low-hanging fruit to pick, everyone soon falls in love with the new reactive “Predictive” maintenance program. 

The same holds true for adding maintenance planning and scheduling.  I have seen many organizations that were very effective at planning the wrong work.  They could plan work but that work did not prevent or detect failures and some times that planned work even caused additional failures.

Last but not least, a pet peeve of mine are maintenance programs that substitute FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) for RCM (Reliability-Centered Maintenance) or PM Optimization (PMO) for maintenance task analysis.  Per my friend and Reliability Centered Maintenance Using RCM Blitz book author Doug Plucknette, FMEA falls short because:

• Failure Modes are assessed at a higher level
• It does not use a formal decision process to determine the correct tasks
• It does not consider what should be done if there is no applicable or effective task

FMEA is a tool and does not a strategy make!

Tools and tactics are needed for high-performance maintenance, however having them and aiming them are two different things.

Maintenance leaders and team members in the Tools and Tactics phase know or at least sense that there are positive ways forward.  Many times they begin to see the possibilities that come from a high-performance maintenance programs.  Other programs languish in this area and I believe it comes from maintenance leaders who have become comfortable and are often highly acknowledged by top company leadership for picking the low hanging fruit and creating (temporary) results.  These leaders are unable or unwilling to formally adopt the high-performance maintenance strategies that are already so well documented and proven. 

Strategies Phase
Since 1978, the concept of Reliability-centered Maintenance (RCM) has been spreading as a dominant strategy for almost all high-performance maintenance programs.  In summary, RCM shifted efforts from maintenance as “fixing things” to maintenance as “ensuring that things functioned” as the asset owner requested.  Using a disciplined analysis techniques, failure causes and consequences were identified and intervention and prevention strategies were developed.

Living programs and Root Cause analysis allow the strategy to be continuously improved and Reliability Engineering methods like Weibull Analysis provide even more resources for performance.

The strategy phase is much harder to create and fully implement than the tactics and tools phase.  Think about your top management when they hear that their top talent is locked away in rooms – sometimes for weeks at a time, talking about failure that “might” occur.    Executives who lack vision often see very little value in this approach and only support a small fraction of the resources that are needed to fully implement and apply this strategy.  If that is not bad enough, almost everyone else in the company will not only resist this new strategy, some will actively work to undermine it because of the change it represents to them.  Undermining a strategy is much easier than successfully implementing one.

Culture Of Engagement

Please understand that I am a big fan of the tool, tactics, technologies and strategies that are well-documented and proven effective for high performance maintenance programs.  The problem I have seen is that too many programs that were tool, tactic and strategy focused failed to deliver sustainable business results and often fall back into early cycle phases that repeat every decade or so.

I call it the Vicious Cycle Of Maintenance Improvements and it results when the past improvement efforts fail to engage the other members of the organization.  When universal engagement is lacking, improvement programs are at risk from funding reduction, manpower reduction, key personnel changes and many other short-term decisions that come from above.

In order to create a culture of engagement, everyone involved in making the journey to high-performance must see how that journey relates to him or her.  They must know that they are respected as people, that their ideas are heard, that they have some ability to impact the performance and that this new and different performance level benefits them in some way.   That takes much more than telling them about it once or twice.

In order to ensure that your maintenance program reaches and sustains a high-performance level, you must ensure that you get the tools, tactics and strategies right enough to generate consistent business results.  You must also make those results highly visible to everyone in the organization.

As made abundantly clear by Winston Ledet’s Heroic Change series of books, what works in one culture may not work in another.  As William Shakespeare so eloquently writes in Hamlet “therin lies the rub” meaning having the answer is no answer at all.  Knowing the people you work with and what makes them tick is as important if not more important than knowing the right tools, tactics and strategies for improved equipment reliability.

  

Listen and learn more than you speak and teach if you want to remain in the top phase of high-performance maintenance.  Engage everyone in your organization in high-performance maintenance if you want to sustain the results.