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.
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.
