Values in Maintenance and Reliability = RESULTS

Are you living by your values in maintenance and reliability? Clear values of maintenance and reliability will guide everyday decisions in your organization. In Part 1 of this 2-part article, let’s review the most important values to be successful and improve the overall supply chain performance and cost of your plant/mill.

Value 1: Cost reduction does not generate improved reliability. Improved reliability results in lower cost.

During my time as a maintenance supervisor, the plant where I worked was making a major investment that would expand the capacity 4-fold. We started with an organizational review of how many resources to hire, at what skill level, and how to train them. At first, we presented the case that 4× capacity would mean a 4-fold increase in manning, using similar equipment. That was completely wrong!

Our KPIs showed that we had improvements in unscheduled work and that breakdown rate and maintenance cost had decreased. Improvements were also seen in production output: increased yield, less contamination, and increased on-spec product based on equipment reliability improvements.

Improvements were gained by focusing on our maintenance processes. We had driven down reactive maintenance with improved preventive maintenance, condition monitoring, planning and scheduling, quality of repair work, employee development, and ongoing team feedback. So, we challenged the idea to just “add more maintenance people.” We knew that economies of scale must be considered. We also compared the manning at other sites with similar equipment.

We decided that we only needed a 2× increase in resources instead of 4×, despite the 4-fold increase in equipment to maintain. Our decision was proven since we operated with the same resources for years after the expansion. We focused on reliability first, which resulted in lower maintenance cost per unit output over time.

Value 2: People cannot be more productive than the system they work in allows them to be.

A football team without a game plan or clear roles and responsibilities will not become Super Bowl champions. This also applies to maintenance organizations. I was invited to a client’s plant to assess their reliability and maintenance processes. After completing safety training, I reviewed a few documents and started to interview craftspeople. (See the sidebar below for how one of the millwrights described his day.)

An excellent maintenance tradesperson cannot be successful in an organization where there are no clear work processes supporting them to execute maintenance.

Value 3: It is leadership’s responsibility to develop, communicate, and coach implementation of reliability and maintenance processes.

Maintenance and reliability can be divided into 10 key processes. These processes must be implemented by the maintenance and reliability manager with 100 percent support from the Operations and Engineering teams. The most important processes include:

• leadership and organization
• planning and scheduling
• preventive maintenance/essential care and condition monitoring
• materials management
• employee coaching and development

Once I was working with a client who was pushing to increase output of one paper machine. The focus would be on improving planning and scheduling.

The machine was performing well below industry standards for uptime and quality. There was no formal schedule for weekly work. We sat down with the maintenance manager and the supervisors and agreed to develop a weekly schedule that was approved and published on Thursdays. We developed workflows with roles and responsibilities, a scheduling template, a meeting agenda, and a review process of work ready to be scheduled. We also spent significant time with the maintenance team to get input and coach them on the process.

The trouble came with trying to convince some of the supervisors to actually use the schedule and follow the process. We asked the maintenance supervisor why he didn’t attend the scheduling meetings. He insisted that scheduling work orders was “not his job.” I told him we had agreed on the scheduling process—but the maintenance manager did not communicate the process, share his expectations of roles and responsibilities, or directly coach the process. This is why the team had not bought into the scheduling process.

It is the responsibility of management to implement clear work processes to support execution of work. The manager must participate, coach, and provide performance management—otherwise it will not happen.

Value 4: First decide the right things to do, then do them right.

How many times do we in maintenance and reliability get stuck on solving problems by going way too far into technical detail?

I worked for some time as a maintenance engineer at a plant that had major problems with vacuum pumps for the drum filters. The operations and maintenance leaders held several meetings discussing in detail what the problem could be. The operations engineer was sure that the skills of the millwright were the problem; the maintenance manager was sure that the machine shop making spare parts for the vacuum pumps was the problem. I thought: we need to get the facts and figure out how to fix this.

We needed to develop an approach to manage the process of improving the reliability of the vacuum pumps and agree on a process for root cause problem elimination.

• When there is a failure or breakdown of the equipment, start by gathering physical evidence and document the event.
• Provide a trigger to start the formal root cause process.
• Develop a problem statement.
• Develop a How-Can diagram with possibilities.
• Document the facts.
• Provide a timeline.
• Provide alternative solutions.
• Pick the solution.
• In some cases, test the solution and circle back as needed.
• Implement the solution.
• Follow up to make sure that the problem was eliminated.

At first, we struggled to follow the process. We forgot to document problems when they occurred. We replaced parts, like the shaft, without saving them to measure and identify the construction material. Many moons later, we finally started to make headway; we had now identified 19 different problems and were on the way to correct them.

Results: Vacuum pump MTBF improved from three months to three years. We learned that the right thing to do is manage the process, then determine if we followed the steps correctly, or to figure out the steps before execution and then follow up.

Value 5: The right people are an organization’s most vital asset.

The plant was expanding, so we needed to find maintenance team leads for each area of the production unit. We selected four new people to take on the leadership position and promoted three from within. After a few months of trying to mentor, coach, and train, we heard complaints about one of the four new team leaders: the team leader did not participate in the operations meetings and there were a lot of quality issues regarding corrective maintenance jobs; maintenance craftspeople were complaining about the lack of communication. The operations manager had talked to the maintenance lead, and he said, “We do our things, and you can stay out of our business.”

We set up regular meetings and coaching sessions with the team lead. After three months with little improvement, we decided to move the team lead into another role and promote somebody else.

Only the people with the right skills, the right attitude, and the ability to work as a productive team member are vital assets. Leadership should continuously review their own ability to select the right people and support them to be successful in their role. We need the right people with the right strengths for the specific job at hand.

Value 6: Busy people are not productive unless they work on the right thing. Therefore, measurement methods such as “Wrench Time” are not right to do.

The craftspeople were very busy in the beginning of the plant’s start-up. We used the number of work orders and hours recorded per week to check and help our maintenance team to be effective. If hours of work recorded and number of work orders completed were low, we would set up meetings with the team leads and the craftsperson.

Of course, the most important measurement for craft efficiency was scheduled compliance and work quality. More than 90 percent scheduled compliance for the weekly and daily schedules was best-in-class maintenance performance, so that was our target for the second half of the year. Based on the trend of scheduled compliance, we were above 80 percent in the first quarter, and it was trending up.

There was one area team that had high recorded work order hours, but below 60 percent scheduled work order compliance. One day when the maintenance lead arrived at the maintenance shop, he overheard the mechanics say, “Just keep a wrench in your hand and look busy so nobody will bother you about the schedule.”

Being proactive and efficient at what we do and completing planned and scheduled work is the key to success. It is human nature to focus on things that we like to do instead of business priorities.

Value 7: People do not mind change, but they do not like to be changed.

After being the maintenance manager for a few years, I was asked in our yearly organizational development plan if I was interested in being the operations manager. I prepared for the new role and ended up being selected. After a few months as the operations manager for the solids and granulation plant, our team realized that the operating cost was too high and we were losing business to competitors; we needed to find ways to decrease product cost.

After a few meetings with the staff, including process engineers, plant supervisors, maintenance leads, and our production coordinator, we decided to start looking for waste in our operation. We focused on cleaning, raw material handling, administration of production consumables, and operations-maintenance tasks. The highlights of the changes were:

• Started using the vacuum system to clean up raw materials instead of using water. The combination of the binder and water was not a good idea. The water also entered instrumentation and the electrical systems, causing ongoing interruptions.
• Part of the raw material addition used bag dumping stations; instead, we invested in big bags and an automated system for the raw material additions.
• We used a lot of production consumables such as filters and gaskets that are kept in stock. We set up an inventory system that saved significant time for ordering, cycle counts, and minimizing the stock.
• We introduced increased operator maintenance to clean out equipment between batches. Operators also started doing minor repairs like checking/cleaning sensors, changing gaskets, cleaning scales and screw conveyors, changing filters in baghouses, or tightening bolts. The outcome: our throughput increased.

During this process, the plant supervisor was concerned and was frequently telling me that changing how we operated could not be a good idea. I reminded him that he agreed in our staff meeting that these changes were necessary for us to decrease cost per unit. He agreed and said that he didn’t mind the change but was worried that it would not work. He suggested that we stop doing some of the changes. I reminded him that most of the changes started to show some very good results. The plant supervisor was probably one of the best supervisors we had, a top performer, and normally very confident.

I believe this shows that most people agree to make improvements and change the way we do things, but they may feel uncomfortable changing the way they work. There are many ways to approach change management, but the important steps to make the changes, in this case, were:

• There was a real need for change: i.e., cost too high.
• You must communicate the need to change.
• The leadership team agreed on the changes.
• The leadership team did not let up.
• We communicated the improvement results, which reinforced the change.
• We sustained all the changes by updating job descriptions, operations SOPs, etc.
• We rewarded employees who quickly reenacted the changes.

The changes showed big results in the form of increased throughput. We managed through attrition and promotions to go from seven to five operators on each shift in the main production area.

Keep an eye out for values 8-15 in the next issue!

A Millwright Without Hope

“I got here at 6 a.m. As soon as I walked in the door, the operators called me to fix a few pieces of equipment, so I didn’t have time to look at the work orders the supervisor gave us last week. The equipment needs to be locked out to work on, so we are not shutting down for another six weeks.

“The one work order I managed to get in my pocket was due two weeks ago. The job required a new mechanical seal and bearings for the repair. I went to the storeroom for the parts and they said, ‘You can have the bearings, but the seal is expensive so we need the operations manager’s approval.’ I asked for a form to take to him, but the attendant told me that the manager needed to send an email. This took about 45 minutes because there was a line for parts and nobody working the store when I got there.

“After that, I went to the shop and the supervisor asked me to check out a leak on the production line. I decided to change a gasket so the leak would stop, but it took me a while because my toolbox was in the other shop. I finally got ahold of a forklift to carry my tools and went back to change the gasket. As soon as I tightened the flange, the operations supervisor walked by and said that I needed to use a Viton gasket due to the type of acid.

“I took my second trip to the storeroom to hear that the Viton gaskets are on order. I asked when they would be delivered, and the storeroom attendant told me to ask the procurement person in the office complex across the street.

“Then, an air compressor motor failed. It needs to be changed by tonight, so I’m going to miss my daughter’s softball game, and they’re in the finals.”