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Are you living by your values in Maintenance and Reliability? Clear values of maintenance and reliability in the organization will guide everyday decisions. Let’s review the most important values for success and improving the overall supply chain performance and cost of your plant/mill.
Value 8: Basic maintenance processes must be in place before implementing more advanced tools.
The leader must have a plan! Too many times I have seen a high expectation turn into an unrealistic plan for maintenance staff and tradespeople. If we try to make major changes and improvements with …
- An unrealistic time schedule to implement a new process;
- Too many tasks or projects overloading a person or team;
- Unattainable goals;
- Not enough support or resources available to successfully implement an improved process;
- Latest technology, but no training or action based on the data—for example, AI and machine learning, remote monitoring of vibration and temperature, ultrasonic lubrication, electric motor testing, etc.—we are setting ourselves up to fail!
During my time as a maintenance manager at a biotech plant years ago, I saw opportunities to improve based on the operating performance of the plant. I ended up finding out that there was much more change needed than I thought, and I needed to make a plan. Where do we start? Take these actions as the first steps to improve:
Leadership and Organization:
- Develop a long-term plan with goals—at least three years.
- Each person in the maintenance staff and teams should not have more than three major goals for the year, though they should be stretched to meet high performance.
- Develop an activity-based budget.
- Implement performance management: basic KPIs include scheduled compliance, PM compliance, unplanned downtime, and budget compliance.
Planning and Scheduling:
- Set agenda for weekly planning and scheduling meetings for each operating area.
- Manage work requests.
- Prioritize work according to a standard.
- Plan work before scheduling.
- Develop weekly maintenance work order schedule.
- Follow up on work order execution, quality, completion.
- Manage the backlog of work.
Preventive Maintenance/Essential Care and Condition Monitoring:
- Document PM work orders for all critical equipment.
- Prevention to extend life: cleaning, lubrication, oil analysis, alignment, balancing, precision maintenance procedures, and calibrations.
- Find failures early to plan and schedule corrective maintenance in a timely manner. Visual inspection can still capture 50 percent of component failures.
- Use the Failure Developing Period to set the frequency of measurement/inspection.
- Implement quick daily rounds to check for rapidly developing or catastrophic failures, or failures without a Failure Developing Period.
Materials Management:
- Update all the equipment and physical assets in the CMMS.
- Record all spare parts using the nomenclature standard in the CMMS; each part must have a designated storage location.
- Tie all existing parts to the equipment (BoM).
- Develop decision diagram for how to make stock decisions and how to set min/max level.
- Make sure that parts are being maintained and not being damaged in storage.
Putting the basics in place was the first part of the plan. Now we were ready to start looking into more advanced tools and technology. Our success was so great that our team was driving and pushing for improvements in Engineering and Operations. The maintenance department went from having a bad reputation to the whole organization calling us to help them solve all kinds of problems. We also started to provide maintenance advice to our end customers and developed a brochure on how we could help them solve equipment problems.
Value 9: Rapid and sustainable change does not exist in maintenance because the change process is 90 percent about people and behaviors.
Let’s talk about “the Flywheel Effect.” Everyone who has worked in a maintenance organization knows that developing PM work orders, inspection procedures, SOPs and workflows, planning work orders, scheduling work, etc. is the easy part. Getting the maintenance team and operators to follow the procedures is the hard part. To change people’s behavior, we need to manage the change process, show leadership, and get buy-in. That requires:
- Management commitment
- Management visibility
- Communication
- Asking for and receiving input and feedback
- Providing training and coaching
- Rewarding the right behavior
- Following up on performance and accountability.
When I was a maintenance manager, I spent a lot of time talking about what best practices look like with my team. We spent a lot of time on the floor to be directly involved and support our maintenance leads and techs. As the saying goes, “Any staff person in Operations/Maintenance/Engineering must always have one foot in the Operations door.” How else would you know what is going on in Operations?
One important aspect was that we were serious about listening to the maintenance team’s ideas on how to make improvements. We made sure that we would stand up for our team when they had tough times, but stay open to critiques from our partners in Operations and Engineering.
In the end, it became everybody’s job to improve. We had maintenance leads and techs who showed up in our offices frequently with ideas on how to make things better. This is what we call the Flywheel Effect. If you get it started moving forward, it will continue to move on its own based on the momentum. It is very likely that we can make significant improvements or get quick wins in six months, but implementing best practices and seeing significant results can take up to three years.
Value 10: Operations, Maintenance, Engineering, and Stores must work in a partnership to reach excellence.
Maintenance is NOT a service organization. Maintenance depends on the full support of other departments to be successful. If Operations and Engineering does not support the work process in maintenance, reliability will not improve.
Let’s look at some examples of what can happen when departments act like silos:
Planning and Scheduling:
- Operations goes directly to the maintenance technicians to get jobs done, bypassing the maintenance schedule and causing ineffective use of resources.
- Operators do not do basic equipment cleaning and inspections, causing more equipment breakdowns.
- Operations does not report equipment problems through the work request system, causing a major failure to be forgotten and causing downtime.
- Operations does not shut down equipment according to the schedule, so maintenance must be postponed; PMs are postponed, and reliability decreases.
New Equipment Start-up:
- Equipment manuals and drawings for new equipment are not provided, causing delays in finding parts and setting up the PM program.
- Engineering is not using standards that will support maintenance and reliability of the equipment:
- They use multiple models and equipment. Having the same models in stock increases spare parts value.
- Equipment is not designed for corrective maintenance. For example, a beam must be cut out to remove a motor, but there is no access to change the gearbox. The conduit was put in, but it hinders the removal of the pump.
- Rotating equipment such as couplings, shafts, bearings, belts, or chain drives cannot be inspected on-the-run safely without locking out the equipment.
The Maintenance department should be expected to deliver “equipment reliability at optimal cost per unit output,” but it is not a service. A service organization’s job is to follow directions; maintenance departments work to deliver on a strategic goal.
Following clear values (IDCON calls them “beliefs”) of reliability and maintenance is crucial for success in your plant or mill. Beliefs are hypotheses about the world—in this case, about maintenance and reliability. Values are how we attribute worth of maintenance systems, processes, tools, technology, and people’s behaviors.
