Five Reliability and Maintenance Management Mistakes

I have been in the industrial operations and maintenance business for more than six decades in an international arena, and during four of these decades I have been preaching that it is more important to first do the right things and then do them right. In my view, leadership and management should decide the right things to do. When you have decided what the right things to do are and document and communicate these to your organization, you have completed an important part of your strategy. The next step would be to involve your organization to implement each element of the RMM strategy by doing the right things right.

Most organizations I work with are doing the right things, but not many execute all elements of the strategy correctly. Some do the wrong things. Here are some of the most common mistakes.

1. Confusing the Holistic RMM System with Supporting Tools and Processes

There are many excellent tools and supporting processes that a plant can leverage to enhance performance of a holistic Reliability Maintenance Management (RMM) system. The holistic RMM system centers around work management and includes processes for preventive maintenance, prioritization, planning, scheduling, bill of materials, interfacing with stores, and root cause problem elimination.

Most organizations have gone through a multitude of improvement programs. Many of these initiatives aren’t completed or sustained. In many cases, if a new tool is introduced, people think of it as just another “program of the month.” Thus, it’s crucial to explain how any new tool fits into a holistic RMM system and that, just like safety, performance indicators for reliability and maintenance performance must continue to be reinforced to drive continuous improvements. The sidebar lists some common supporting tools/processes. All of these tools are great—but again, explain to your organization that these are just tools.

2. Using Wrench Time as a Performance Indicator

Wrench time, or hands-on-tools-time, is a decades-old philosophy focusing on measuring whether craftspeople are busy (or not) with tools in their hand. In my opinion, this is the wrong thing to do even if you have another definition of what “wrench time” is. This is why:

• “Busy” people are not necessarily productive unless they work on the right things. More importantly, people do not like to be micromanaged, so it is not well received by the craftspeople who are so important to motivate. In a modern plant with a good maintenance organization, time to think, find solutions, and implement improvements is more important than just keeping people “busy.”
• It drives the wrong behavior. People might take longer to do a repair, pretend to be busy to increase wrench time, stay out of sight so you cannot measure, etc.
• It violates what Deming said many years ago, which still holds true: “People cannot be more efficient than the system they work in allows them to be.” Ask any craftsperson why they are not busy doing the right work, and they will say, “They don’t plan and schedule work well here, so we are very reactive, need to determine the scope of work, get parts and tools, safely lock out and tag out equipment, etc.”
• For daily work, you might have more wrench time if you have a lot of breakdowns. I agree that during a shutdown people should be busy doing the right things safely and correctly, with the right tools and spare parts/material. What some call “wrench time” will be higher and that is because shutdown work is better planned and scheduled.

What do you measure instead of wrench time? The answer is that you plan, schedule, and communicate better. Measure planned jobs in schedules, ensure schedule compliance, and add on jobs to schedules. Then find what you can improve (probably how priorities are used). Are the schedules set by emotion, or based on true importance? Schedules that are not frozen in advance, finding it too easy to add jobs on short notice, and many other reasons cause emotional priorities. Improve where you have gaps in the work management process and the right people will safely do the right work more efficiently.

3. Putting All Maintenance People on Shift

I don’t believe this is the right thing to do. It often happens when the maintenance organization reports to operations; they might want to have maintenance coverage available 24/7 because they have experienced many breakdowns. Why do I think this is the wrong thing to do?

• Maintenance work will become very reactive because it will be complicated to plan and schedule work.
• Communication between maintenance shifts will be difficult.
• Gathering all maintenance people for training and information sessions is difficult.

The best organizations I have worked with have a good call-in process with no, or very few, maintenance people on shift. Instead of reacting to a high volume of urgent maintenance work and putting more maintenance people on shift, their strategy has been to improve preventive maintenance and root cause problem elimination, reduce urgent work, plan and schedule better, teach operators to do some maintenance work, and gradually reduce maintenance people on night shift and move them to day shift.

4. Using New Technology Before You Are Ready for It

Don’t misunderstand me: I am all for new technologies and have introduced many during my work in plants worldwide. It was not difficult to get people interested and even enthusiastic about the technology, but using it efficiently was more difficult. As an example, after purchasing an SPM instrument, it could be a challenge to set up a round to do the measurements and then have people executing these rounds on a regular basis. Sometimes it could be more difficult to make sure action would be taken on all bearings in alarm level, so many still ran to breakdown. Similar challenges are still true today and perhaps even more so.

Online sensors would be more common to use today, but if your RMM system is very reactive, the problem will be the same.

Many young engineers entering industrial maintenance have been introduced to a flood of good new technologies during their education. The “people part” of using these technologies is not often included in the training, so it is understandable that they will focus more attention to the introduction of the new technologies than on people and processes.

Not all, but most “new” technologies, including data collection, are used to learn about equipment and to detect failures and failure patterns at an even earlier stage than existing technology can do it. This is great. It will improve equipment reliability if the mill can channel all this information into the work management system, so failures will be repaired before they end up in a breakdown. Now, imagine how this will work if some of these technologies are introduced into a reactive maintenance organization: the system will be overloaded with work requests and, with limited resources, the risk is that not much will improve.

The best organizations improve the basic work management system and reduce reactive maintenance to less than 10 percent of all work, then introduce new technologies. They use the technology they are ready for.

At this point, I will reiterate what Bill Gates said many years ago:

“The first rule of technology used in a business is that automation [new technology] applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation [new technology] applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

5. Decentralizing Maintenance to Report to Operations

Unless the maintenance organization is small, a common mistake is to decentralize a maintenance organization, so they report to operations. Justifications often include:

• “Maintenance personnel will develop more ownership to the operations area.”
• “Maintenance will achieve a closer working relationship with operations.”
• “There will be fewer managers, so we will save money.”

These justifications are the most common. I’d like to offer my opinions and experiences from many organizations I have worked with that have tried to “save money” this way.

If your basic maintenance practices (planning and scheduling, preventive maintenance, stores, technical database) are not instituted as a way of life, do not make this move. Why? You will end up with many poorly performing maintenance organizations instead of only one poorly performing maintenance organization. On top of that you will expect several different managers (who will often be inexperienced in RMM) to implement and/or improve on these maintenance basics. Because of lack of knowledge in maintenance management, time, interest, willingness, or everything discussed in the article, the following things are very likely to happen within six to nine months:

• You’ll have more maintenance people on shift—because that will feel more secure. As one consequence of more maintenance people on shift, operators will request a lot of “Honey Do” jobs.
• More maintenance people will be stationed in areas to be available and ready to react to problems because this leads to faster repairs of problems.
• Work requests will not be entered into the computer system, because it is easier and more convenient to just call people.
• It will become more difficult to move people between departments for shutdowns.
• Overtime and contractor hours will start increasing even though there are more people on shift.
• Backlog will start to increase.
• Equipment history will be lost.
• Equipment reliability will begin to decline.

At this point, the mill’s total maintenance cost has gone up, but operations managers may not be able to see the whole picture.

There are additional typical phenomena to be observed and sometimes actions to improve the situation that do not happen. This is often because the manager(s) who initiated the change refuse to see or admit that it was a mistake. Often it takes up to three years, or an earlier change of management, before someone with enough clout in the organization realizes that maintenance is out of control, and you need to reinstitute the practices you used to have. The fact is that many organizations can repeat this cycle many times over a 10-15-year period. Well, at least it keeps consultants like me in business!

As you can see, I am not in favor of handing over maintenance to operations. This is because I have seen too many situations as described here and no example of sustainable improvement from doing so.

It’s not possible to say which maintenance organization structure is best for everyone. The answer depends on size of the organization, skill levels, geographic location, how well the basic processes are instituted, etc. Most of the most successful organizations I have worked with have had maintenance resources designated to each production area but reporting to a central maintenance organization.

Never stop improving the basics!