Focus on Reliability

Cliff Williams

Recent Posts by Cliff Williams:

Good Spare Parts Inventory Management – A Lucky Shot or a Well Thought Out Process

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Many times, we are asked to visit organizations with a view to identifying where the biggest challenges to a successful maintenance and reliability lie. Quite often we are shown where the problems lie but there is no real understanding of ‘why’ they exist. There is one situation that arises in pretty much every organization in some form or other and that’s a disconnect between maintenance and the procurement or storeroom functions. There are many variations on who does what in this function and even who owns what, far too many for me to go into every scenario, so for the sake of this blog I’m going to treat them as three separate functions and you can fit them to your situation.

Topics: Maintenance Storeroom Stockroom Shutdowns and Turnarounds Maintenance and Reliability Storeroom/ Materials Management materials management training

Fundamentals of Leadership

Leadership 1120 720 72Still the most challenging topic most companies face in maintenance and reliability is one of leadership. Many organizations feel that they are not achieving the effectiveness and efficiency they believe they should due to a lack of understanding of leadership. The one thing that has stood out in my recent visits to organizations to help with this challenge has been the lack of a fundamental of leadership – managing. The interesting part is that each organization recognized they needed work on things like motivation, inspiration, involvement, engagement etc. but none recognized that their structure and systems for managing were broken. If we don’t have the systems in place to manage and control how do we expect to demonstrate those afore-mentioned traits of leaders? We need to remember that a good manager may be a good leader, but good leaders MUST be good managers. Too often we think of leadership in the philosophical terms that were mentioned but as the leadership guru Peter Drucker’s “Effective leadership is not about making speeches and being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.”

Having Leadership and Supervision issues at your site?  Want to make a change ? Let us bring our Maintenance Leadership and Supervision Course to you.   

Topics: Maintenance Management Maintenance and Reliability Leadership and Supervision Maintenance training Key Performance Indicators or Metrics Change Management

Doing Things Better or Doing The Better Things?

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A couple of months ago, I visited an organization that had just started an initiative to reduce their spend on spare parts. The odd thing about this initiative was that it was driven by finance and procurement. The focus was on cutting the price they paid for these spare parts. When I asked why this initiative had started, I was told that someone in finance felt that their procurement practices weren’t what they should be. They believed that there was opportunity to cut costs through better management of the process.

Topics: Planning and Scheduling Maintenance Planning Scheduling Maintenance and Reliability Reliability Centered Maintenance Key Performance Indicators or Metrics Inventory management materials management training RCM3 Training purchasing

Moving Storeroom Measures Forward

 

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Topics: Maintenance Storeroom Stockroom Storeroom/ Materials Management Key Performance Indicators or Metrics storeroom training Inventory management materials management training

The Hidden Gem

sm-mro-shutterstock_509974087How many times have you walked around a hardware store or a kitchen store and seen a tool or instrument that just made you shake your head and say to yourself ‘Wow if I’d had that when I tried to do…………………………….. life would have been so much easier!’

Topics: CMMS/ EAM Systems Maintenance Management Maintenance Storeroom Stockroom

Who Said Change is Hard? It's Easy!

People-and-processes-change-Cliff-WilliamsRecently I was facilitating a leadership seminar with a group of maintenance and reliability leaders. Everyone had finally agreed that, to improve performance, there had to be change, because as Albert Einstein said “If you do the same things every day and expect different results then that’s the definition of insanity!’. This led us to a discussion around perhaps the most maligned and forgotten management tool available – Change Management. We had an interesting discussion that got a little heated when I suggested that Change was really easy – you simply stop doing one thing and start doing another. The group was a little puzzled as to why I would bring up the topic as being much maligned and then tell them it was easy. That was until I explained that the difficult part of Change Management is the transition of behaviours from the old way to the new way – getting the transition, and so the behaviours you want, is the challenge. I used a work order as an example of what I was saying – if the goal is to change from paper work orders to electronic work orders – the change is fairly simple – you stop using paper work orders! The transition may not be so easy – when you used paper work orders the tradespeople would give great feedback and suggestions on the work order and allowed for continuous improvement but after the change to electronic all you get is ‘complete’ on the bottom of the form. Is that the behavior that you wanted – if not – what went wrong? We talked about the many reasons why the transition didn’t turn out the way we wanted and suggested that things like aging workforce who didn’t have confidence on the computer, people not understanding the benefit of the new system or being part of the development of the new system might have come into play.

Topics: Leadership and Supervision Assessment Benchmarking Gap Analysis maintenance Change Management

Plan, Strategy or Tactic – Which Comes First?

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Topics: Maintenance Management Training Maintenance Planning Scheduling Organization Reliability Centered Maintenance Leadership and Supervision maintenance skills maintenance skills training Maintenance training maintenance

Can’t Get The Answers Because You Don’t Know The Questions?

 

Topics: Maintenance and Reliability

Maintenance & Reliability - The Big Picture

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I’ve been having interesting conversations lately via e-mails, Linkedin, assignments and also at conferences. I’d like to talk about what I’ve seen and heard specifically at a couple of conferences that I’ve spoken at recently. The conversation usually starts with some disgruntled maintenance supervisor or manager telling the people around him or her that they are just not getting the results they expected from their planning and scheduling system or their PM program really doesn’t seem to be delivering what they expected - some may even be bold enough to point the finger at the guys on the shop floor. What happens next is that they get a bunch of heads nodding and comments like ‘Yeh feel the pain and me too.’

Topics: Maintenance and Reliability Reliability Centered Maintenance maintenance

Are your KPIs REALLY your KPIs?

pain-point-people-and-processes.jpgOver the years I’ve had many conversations with organizations around KPIs – what they are, and equally as important, why they are. When I’ve asked why people measure what they do, I have received several different answers, ranging from:

Topics: Maintenance Management Key Performance Indicators or Metrics