Focus on Reliability

This article written by Jeff Shiver originally appeared in Plant Services in June 2022

As an update, from time to time, I think that organizations have moved beyond the following story, only to find that not to be the case, especially in the medium-sized and smaller organizations ...

Sadly for some organizations, their maintenance and operations practices are not much different than the small bands of gold miners going for broke in the Alaskan wilderness as reflected on the television shows.  Operating on shoestring budget, they try to bootstrap their way along, experiencing increased losses from a run to failure mentality.  While run to failure can be a strategy for some equipment, it shouldn’t be for all of your assets, especially the critical ones.  Proactive organizations learned a long time ago that you can’t typically sustain your business with that approach.

Still 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.”

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In the first blog entitled ‘I Just Can’t Get Buy In’ we concluded that when we find ourselves in a situation where Change hasn’t gone the way we wanted, we have no option but to trace the steps back and find out where the initiative went off track. In the example, we used which involved moving from one on one shift communications to computer recorded, it was that some employees had English as a second language. Quite often it is not something as drastic as that but no matter what the reason for the sidetrack it is only recognized after a failure. This approach is very much like employing Reactive Maintenance as your maintenance strategy – we wait until something fails and do whatever we need to fix it.