Focus on Reliability

Although these exact words do not appear in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ the conversation between The Cat and Alice captures the sentiment that you need to have a goal in mind if you are planning a journey. The actual words

Why is it that we find a the last names Wainwright, Cooper, and a Fletcher in telephone directory listings today? Will it be long before we see the last name Millwright there? For those who are wondering what I’m talking about I’ll explain – a Wainwright was a skilled builder of wagons, a Cooper skillfully made barrels. An arrow only flew true because they were made by the highly skilled Fletcher. So before they became surnames, they were skilled trades that have all but disappeared. So why do I suggest that Millwright may go the way of the Dodo?

‘What idiot decided to put that valve up there?’

“And how exactly are we supposed to get that pump out of there?’

‘How come you’ve got to fix it again – you fixed it last week?’

‘Well if you would just operate properly then it wouldn’t be broken all of the time’

How many times have you heard statements like these? I know I have heard them many times no matter what industry or what organization. Are they fair comments or are the prejudiced or biased – are they simply people making excuses or are they symptoms of a very common problem? This common problem occurs when the design engineers get the equipment installed without consulting operations and maintenance and then simply hand over the keys. Or when you have a culture where operations owns it when it’s running but maintenance owns it when it’s failed – no matter the reason for the failure.

We left off  the last post talking about the value of measuring PM Compliance in our CMMS. Many organizations use the +/- 10 % rule, whereby if they complete the PM within 10% of the frequency it is considered to be compliant. Now this is a good measure if you are looking to determine whether you get the PMs issued and completed on time but what else does it tell you about the PM – what does it tell you about how the PM was completed or whether we have prevented or mitigated a failure (the purpose of PMs)? The answer is – next to nothing and over the years I have seen many a PM completed from the comfort of the lunchroom and PMs that don’t really explain what it is they are there for.

Most organizations these days have some form of CMMS – Computerized Maintenance Management System – whether it’s a home based Access system or it’s a full blown EAM – Enterprise Asset Management System – and many stops in between. Now I think it’s fair to assume that people have got at least part of the idea of a CMMS right. Unfortunately it’s only the Computerized and System that has been implemented. Most have forgotten the Maintenance Management part of the acronym! I visit many sites and talk with many people and to be honest, I am no longer surprised to see that people use their CMMS to manage their work orders – and only that.

In the industrial world, the corporate and site leadership is focused on creating shareholder value and profit. They accomplish this by managing people, the human capital within the organization. These concepts are by-products of the MBA curriculum  taught at many business schools. But are we missing something?

There once was a maintenance guru who tried to help explain the challenges of improving the performance of maintenance departments and the need for change to achieve it.

To set the scene he said that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing every day and to expect different results. He had obviously seen those organizations that continue to do the same PMs each week even though they experience failures! I wonder if he saw that the backlog list was getting longer and longer even though they planned and scheduled their work only to have the schedule blown apart by breakdowns and those ‘emotional’ jobs that take precedence – just because. What about the repeat failures that we just keep repairing without figuring out why they keep happening? Insanity – well if not completely then very close to it.

I was involved in a discussion on Linkedin recently when the question was asked It is believed that you can plan without scheduling but cannot schedule without planning – the discussion took some twists and turns until I thought I’d post my experiences with this question – this is what I wrote!

Another guest post from Trent Phillips.

Welcome to another guest post by our friend, Trent Phillips.