Over the past few years, we have witnessed the implementation of multiple improvement programs within the manufacturing community in efforts to enhance performance and profitability. While these efforts have been wide ranging, three in particular are familiar to the reliability and maintenance (R&M) community:
- Focusing reliability improvement efforts on technological advances in areas such as vibration monitoring, thermography, Weibull analysis, etc. The use of these technologies, tools and methods have resulted in significant reliability improvements.
- Improving maintenance performance by identifying, documenting and applying best practices. When applied consistently, these best practices have produced significant performance gains.
- The application of lean manufacturing principles in operations. This has led to significant changes in the workplace in attempts to improve overall productivity.
While the results of these programs have been noteworthy, the struggle to "sustain the gain" over the long run remains a major challenge. Programs get implemented, produce results and then two or three years later they have lost their effectiveness and are back at, or close to, ground zero. The repetitive nature of this problem makes identifying the key factors to sustaining R&M improvements highly desirable from a business perspective.
Some of the challenges to sustaining a successful R&M program have been created by the solutions themselves. For example, technology has indisputably been at the center of significant reliability improvements. Yet, often the technology used to gather and maintain important R&M information supports data isolation, minimizing its usefulness and inhibiting interdepartmental communication. Likewise, the application of best practices has produced significant performance gains, but the lack of a permanent management system to ensure "consistent" application has minimized the long-term effectiveness of these efforts. And, while lean manufacturing principles have led to workplace productivity improvements, the intense focus on operations has led to a strategic oversight of the importance of other work processes interfacing with R&M.
Recognizing the symbiotic nature of success
It is well known and accepted that reliability and maintenance are inextricably woven together. The fate of each group is tied to the performance of the other and the best business results are realized when this relationship is symbiotic. However, there is a third and often overlooked group whose participation is required for an R&M improvement program to be maximized and sustained - operations.
The need for this inclusion is clear when a proactive, failure based maintenance strategy is created. This strategy requires the identification of conditions and processes which can lead to equipment damage before the damage occurs and the failure mechanism has begun to deteriorate performance. With this proactive approach identified as a key goal, consider the synergy gained when operations is included in the effort. Operations personnel work with the equipment on a daily basis and understand the operating and failure characteristics of the equipment. Their operating knowledge provides key information to identify and prevent processes and conditions that lead to equipment damage. Linking operator knowledge into a failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA) driven maintenance strategy will yield more effective risk reduction tasks. In addition, by participating in task creation, operators will feel "ownership" of the solution, a pivotal factor in program sustainability.
Using technology as an instrument for change
Operators know the operating parameters of their processes and equipment and they recognize when it isn't running correctly. Using this knowledge to build failure based maintenance plans will identify mitigation tasks that can be included in operator rounds (inspections). These inspection tasks can comprise up to 50% of the R&M program's proactive tasks. Further, a properly designed R&M program will link these inspection tasks to the information system, allowing the operator to create alarms on out of limit conditions at the point of detection. This process typically involves integrating handheld technology with the work management system.
Once the right tasks and information management technology have been put into place, a critical, but often overlooked part of the solution is the work processes facilitating information transfer between operations and maintenance. The solution described above relies on organizational links and integrators helping to identify problems early; transfer information; and unify teams on common business needs. These interfacing work processes, and the accompanying peer-to-peer relationships, are critical to the success of this proactive solution. Studies indicate that management systems fail primarily due to a poor understanding of the interfaces that connect systems (Kerzner, 2001, Moffat 1998). These work processes must be mapped, redesigned and the improved processes integrated into the fabric of the everyday work life of operators, mechanics and support groups.
Equally important are the working relationships between the affected individuals. Years of struggling to make poorly designed work processes function can lead to frustration, resentment and non-compliance. These relationships must be mended if this solution is to function effectively. Teamwork is critical to success and the culture of the workplace must be cooperative, team-based and focused on utilizing the strength of each organization and its members to meet the primary business goals.
Many excellent technical solutions have been implemented in the R&M space with varied success. To increase the probability of achieving desired results consider the possibility of leveraging the technical solution by implementing cultural change within the workplace, thereby multiplying the results that are traditionally seen. These leveraged results can far exceed those that are seen from R&M programs with little focus on the sociotechnical impact to the workplace. Integral to the sociotechnical environment is the cultural infrastructure of the workplace. Changing the fabric of this infrastructure is essential to sustainability.
The role of leadership
A key element of successful cultural change is organizational leadership. With respect to this discussion, it is the leadership within operations. It is the operations group that is closest to the customer; and, if the product doesn't get to the customer on time, the feedback is immediate and often unpleasant. As a result, it is operations that must bear the majority of the risk with this change strategy. Consider some of the significant changes operations will experience when implementing this solution:
- Operators will need to adopt new technology, learn how to use it properly and perform reliability based inspections.
- Executing reliability routes will change operators' daily work routines. Even as reliability inspections are integrated into their normal routes, likely more time will be spent out of the control room and on the floor with the equipment.
- Operators will need to learn the normal operating parameters of the equipment in order to identify process abnormalities.
- There will be occasions when hard decisions about taking more time to do the job correctly will have to be made.
- This work process asks operators to identify equipment problems they find on their routes. When these problems are identified, they will expect action to be taken on their recommendations. If leadership lets their recommendations accumulate in the backlog, with no feedback, the program will quickly be categorized as just another "program of the month" and support will quickly wane.
Clearly, these work process modifications can be disruptive to the workplace. It will take thoughtful, persistent and inspired leadership to lead the workforce through this disruption. As evidenced by the many failed R&M programs, without strong operations leadership, this solution will likely be relegated to mediocrity.
Sustaining a successful R&M program requires creating a framework for producing repeatable results. The challenges to accomplishing this are great. Cross functional work processes are highly disruptive to the status quo. Lines of formal authority and responsibility will be blurred. The proactive solution proposed in this paper requires a great deal of power and resource sharing. Leadership is paramount to its success.
In summary, six key factors to building and sustaining a successful R&M program include:
- Using failure analysis to focus resources on failure elimination, prevention or mitigation.
- Deployment of systems which support the efficient transfer of knowledge and information between organizations.
- Optimization of work processes that facilitate information flow between organizations.
- Mending broken work relationships resulting from poor work processes.
- Improvement in the culture of work teams.
- Organizational leadership.
These factors, when addressed, will result in the ability to proactively detect problems early in the failure cycle, manage more complex issues with higher levels of uncertainty, efficiently manage scarce resources and provide the basis for a sustainable R&M program. The benefits will be extended equipment life, lower cost and improved availability - all important contributors to increased performance and profitability.
Click here to learn how Eastman Chemical Company's Tennessee operations forged a new partnership between operations and maintenance using Meridium Operator Rounds and reduced their reactive maintenance by 40%.
About the author
Paul Casto, CRE, CQE, CSSBB, CMRP, VP Value Implementation, Meridium, is a leading practitioner in reliability and maintenance improvement methodologies. He has hands-on experience in reliability, maintenance, operations and engineering in the chemical, steel, aluminum, automotive, aerospace, consumer goods and construction industries. Paul holds a Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from West Virginia University, a Masters degree in Engineering Management from Marshall University Graduate College, an MBA from Clemson University, and a Masters in Maintenance Management and Reliability Engineering from the UT/Monash University program. Paul is an ASQ certified Six Sigma Black Belt, holds ASQ certification in Reliability Engineering and Quality Engineering and is a SMRP Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional. He is currently studying R&M improvement methodologies in the UT graduate engineering program.
