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.

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.

The CMRT Exam is the leading credentialing program for the knowledge, skills and abilities of maintenance and reliability technicians. 

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.’