SKF Reliability Systems - Library

Hi Craig,
Recall how we talked about success in operations and maintenance being a trinity—Asset Management, Lean,
and Quality—all need to be there together; the most important being Quality.
Many companies expect asset management, maintenance and reliability engineering to deliver operational
excellence; but they are not foundation causes. They are only the vehicles to deliver the foundation causes.
These companies strive to improve their business, yet years later their maintenance is still costly and reliability is
still a problem. Eventually they stumble across Lean and try that too, believing it is the missing piece to the
puzzle, but success continues to evade them. They misunderstood that operational excellence is the result of
defect-free operation achieved from a defect-free life cycle.
These companies never decided how good they needed to be to get the results they wanted; they didn’t build the
necessary standards of sure quality into their business processes. All the TPM, 5S, RCM, RCA, FMEA,
reliability modelling and criticality analysis in the world cannot improve your operation much if your machines
aren’t designed for their real duty, are installed deformed, their parts are stressed to failure, are out-of-balance,
are full of contaminants, your workshop rebuilds them wrong and your operators destroy them in ignorance.
Start with precision quality Craig—throughout your business first find and set those standards that always deliver
world class performance and teach your people to meet them every time (shopfloor and office)—nothing you do
will greatly improve operational performance if the design of your business processes destroys your machines.
If I could have my engineering career all over again I’d do things in order of Quality, Lean, and Asset
Management. First find and set the precision quality standards that create the reliability you want and lock them
into place with your Quality System, Lean then brings efficiency to effective practices and Asset Management
produces a life cycle system of repeating success. It took me two decades to see that this is a sure way to worldclass
operational performance and to understand how it could be done. (I explain it in my book, ‘Plant and
Equipment Wellness’ published by EABooks, Sydney, Australia.)
If you want great success in future Craig, first find and set the quality performance standards that will surely
deliver the operational excellence you want. Then build all your business processes to faithfully deliver them.
Best regards,
Mike Sondalini
Lifetime Reliability Solutions
website: www.lifetime-reliability.com
email: info@lifetime-reliability.com
Mob/Cell: (+61) (0)402 731 563
Fax: (+ 61 8) 9457 8642
PS. Please contact me if this is where you want to go with your operation. We’ll work out a strategy and plan to
get you there fast.