Values in Maintenance and Reliability = RESULTS

To read about Maintenance and Reliability Values 1-7, see the July/August 2024 issue of Paper360°. For Values 8-10, see the September/October issue.

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 to be successful and improve the overall supply chain performance and cost of your plant/mill.

Value 11: Lost production reports shall record where and what, then ask WHY to solve and eliminate the problem.

Here’s the scene: I am at a client site to coach the implementation of best practices in maintenance and reliability. I am sitting in the daily operations meeting, where they are reviewing the production results for the last 24 hours. It was not a good 24 hours for this mill’s PM8: a drive had failed on the dryer section. The change of the drive is ongoing and the machine is down. The downtime has been coded as “electrical failure” by the operations superintendent. The operations manager asks if anyone knows what caused the drive to fail. The discussion steers toward how the electrician could miss this.

Do you see what is going on here? Finger pointing. The team is already talking about who is to blame when we don’t even know what caused the problem and there are no facts or data presented.

To avoid going down the wrong path, we need to stay with the following principles to record failures and equipment breakdowns:

1. What component failed or caused a breakdown of the equipment? (Sometimes we don’t know right away.)
2. Describe what happened.
3. Then ask why it happened. You may need to trigger a Root Cause Analysis to gain understanding to eliminate the problem. Do we want to solve the problem … or make your employees defensive? Do not code problems using electrical, mechanical, instrumentation, or operations designation!

Value 12: Keep things simple.

I think you’ll get this one; let me give you an example that I have seen, and you be the judge.

I was documenting the current state of the work order process at a pulp mill. We randomly selected a work order and then I tried to follow up on what happened. This is what we found:

1. Operator finds a mechanical seal leaking on a pump and wants to report to maintenance.
2. Operator writes it down on his note pad.
3. Operator does not have access to CMMS to write a work request, so he tells the operations supervisor to initiate the work requests at the end of the shift.
4. Operations supervisor is stressed and forgets to initiate the request in the CMMS.
5. The next shift the operations supervisor realizes that he forgot the request, but cannot find the equipment number in the CMMS, so he sends an email to the operator to find it.
6. The operator emails back the equipment number and the operations supervisor generates the work request.
7. The next morning, the maintenance supervisor screens and approves the request into a work order. She notices multiple requests for the same seal, which she cancels.
8. The planner reviews the work order for the leaking seal and sees that it has the highest priority. He emails the supervisor to schedule it that evening.
9. The supervisor adds the break-in job for the shift millwright that evening.
10. The shift millwright sees the high priority work order on the schedule, locks out the pump, and dissembles and begins removing the mechanical seal.
11. The millwright goes to the storeroom but there is no mechanical seal in stock.
12. The pump is now down with no backup … and this is the process water pump.

Let’s keep things simple, clear and practical. For starters, notice that in the example here, work order workflow is missing, with roles and responsibilities. Some other issues:

• Operators should enter the work request directly into the CMMS. In the case above, the operator already had access to the CMMS, but did not know and had not been trained.
• Equipment should have equipment tags, including ID number, for easy identification.
• The person who enters the work request needs to check if the problem is already documented on a previous work order.
• No formal priorities means that the job was over prioritized. It could have waited until the following week to avoid a break in work.
• There was no screening by the operations or maintenance supervisors to challenge the priority from the operations side.
• Planner should have reviewed the job in the mill to assess the problem and check the priority.
• Planner should have checked that the part was in stock and kitted the parts before the job was scheduled.

Value 13: The holistic system with its processes and elements can be supported by other tools.

Have you ever experienced a Reliability and Maintenance Improvement Project where it feels like you are drowning? There are project plans, meetings, and the latest buzzwords to describe what you should do—but we tend to confuse things, because tools are cool, but processes are boring. A process contains steps with roles and responsibilities; tools help administrate the process, along with technology to increase efficiency.

Figure 1 presents a simplified version of the holistic system. Once we have laid out the holistic system, we must define how to implement and manage two specific things.

The first thing: What exactly is “prevention”? Your own health may be an example of how you think about prevention. Your thoughts about your health may be to eat healthy, exercise, get outdoors, have fun, and challenge your mental ability. Each one of these tasks could prevent deterioration of your body physically and mentally.

To draw the parallel with equipment in processes, manufacturing and facilities, prevention includes the following:

• Cleaning of equipment
• Lubrication
• Operation practices
• Design for reliability
• Alignment
• Balancing
• Calibration
• Storage and transportation of equipment and parts
• Precision maintenance following specifications during repairs and installation All of these tasks lead to healthy and extended life of the equipment.

The second thing is the process of Work Management, which can be described as “the chain that cannot be broken.” The chain, or work management process shown in Fig. 1, is a simplified view in the Circle of Continuous Improvement. Work Management includes the process of Preventive Maintenance, followed by condition monitoring (inspect) to find failures early to get lead-time to plan and schedule to minimize impact on operations. The next step is to plan work in a way that is efficient, high quality, and safe. When the job is planned, we can schedule to determine when and who is going to do the work. The last step is to provide seamless execution according to of the planned and scheduled work.

Ask yourself: “How well are we executing each step in the chain?”

These are a few of the suggestions we heard in one of the project meetings to improve reliability and maintenance-all starting with the phrase “We need …”:

• a new CMMS
• the latest remote monitoring of bearings
• to install machine learning
• more digitalization and APM
• to do RCM
• to implement “lean maintenance”
• predictive maintenance
• a Kaizen event
• Six Sigma

Yes, these are all great tools and technologies to improve or help manage the holistic system and processes of maintenance. Yet they do not provide the guiding process for managing maintenance: i.e., the two things.

Value 14: Always explain Why, What, and How.

During my time as the maintenance engineer, we experienced several equipment problems due to lubrication issues. We decided to designate certain millwrights to do the lubrication since we realized that the failures were due to over greasing, wrong grease or oil, contamination, incorrect storage, inadequate oil sampling, or not replacing/filtering the dirty oil. We decided that this was due to lack of training.

We began to train the designated millwrights on what to do and how to lubricate. We also documented the PMs with how much grease and oil, type of oil, and tools to use. We spent significant time with the millwrights in the field to practice. We began to follow up on the results, but it was not a step change up to best practice level—we saw only minor improvements. We would still find over-lubricated bearings, dirty dispensing tools, open containers, the wrong oil or grease, unmarked grease guns, missed lube points, etc.

We sat down with the designated lube team and showed them what we wanted them to do. About one minute into the discussion, we finally realized what is going on. One millwright said,

“We have worked a long time in this plant. It is dirty and our workload is already high. This is just more work to follow your lubrication work orders and routes. We decided to add extra grease and not do it as often; the tools you gave us just slow us down; and sampling oil from the large gearboxes seems to be a waste of time because they only last a few years before we change them out.”

These people were smart, but we had not shown them WHY we wanted them to change how to lubricate. A few days later we met again, and we did the following:

• We gathered around a fan bearing and over-greased it on purpose to show the rapid increase in temperature and vibration reading.
• We showed data on contamination type, size of particles, and the amount of water that can damage bearings and other components. We had life curves from studies on how this effects life of the bearings.
• We showed an example of what happens when you mix incompatible types of grease.
• We had bearings with water marks to show how you can recognize that there is moisture present.
• We showed them the analysis from oil samples from before and after using the portable filter cart on a large gearbox.
• We showed some hydraulic valves used with contaminated hydraulic oil.
• Last but not least, we pulled product batch reports where there were quality issues due to lubricants leaking into the product and it was rejected.

One millwright’s comment, leaving the training session: “Why didn’t you train us on this before?”

Value 15: Execution is key to success.

Talk is cheap. Walk the talk, because actions speak louder than words. If you worked in maintenance, you have been part of big plans to improve Maintenance and Reliability. Some of us are good at making plans, others are good at taking action. Successful organizations make plans and execute the plan. Unless the front-line organization executes according to the plan, nothing will change and there will be no improved results. Front-line organization is defined as maintenance supervisors, operations supervisors, tradespeople, maintenance planners and schedulers, operators, and operations and maintenance coordinators.

Following clear values (IDCON call them beliefs) of reliability and maintenance is crucial for success in your plant or mill. Values are how we attribute worth of maintenance systems, processes, tools, technology, and people’s behaviors. Beliefs are hypotheses about the world—in this case, about maintenance and reliability.