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.
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
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.
- 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.
