October - Library - Central Queensland University

What about the stores department? For the past several years they have been engaged in an improvement initiative of driving down
inventory to benchmark levels comparable with world class organisations. Their key driver for improvement being that typically the
value of the spare parts held is equivalent to 25 - 50% of the annual maintenance budget (Moore 1999, p. 126). In addition, it is
estimated that it costs a further 30% to carry the spares (floor space, labour, insurances, etc). The stores department may or may
not understand that reactive organisations need to keep lots of spares, estimated to be a further 20% of world class organisations,
to enable a quick response and hence avoid a potential more costly (to the business) loss of plant downtime. Now maintenance,
whom the store’s department do not report to, wants to fill up the store with all of the parts that has appeared from nowhere and
undo all of the good work of the past several years. The vicious spiral of conflicting KPI’s is alive and well.
If both departments were to take a step back from their respective narrow focused drivers and behaviours and assess their value
add to the business, guided by consensus management for the betterment of the overall business, they would realise that in essence
they are both working toward the same business goals.
The objective of the store’s department should be to provide a service to the maintenance (and operations) department and run the
store as a store should be run - i.e. clean, tidy, tightly controlled and well organised. It should stock the right amount of inventory
levels, as determined by the maintenance department, to minimise and/or mitigate the more costly risks associated with ultimately
stopping the plant and/or processes due to lack of spares. Given that inventory generally represents capital that does not generate
a return, the emphasis here being on the right amount, similar to the story of goldilocks and the three bears, not too many, not too
few, but just the right amount.
If the maintenance department are to set the right inventory levels, which would have been completed during the maintenance plan
/ strategy stage, then they need to be out of the reactive mode of the past, hence the timing is now right, in terms of the journey.
They need to now work with the stores department and together trend inventory levels down as a strategic function of plant re l i a b i l i t y.
This process of improvement, like all of the key maintenance processes, will be ongoing and only sustainable if key improvements
are locked in.
PROACTIVE MAINTENANCE
The next (and third) layer within the pyramid of key maintenance management processes is now ready for construction, referring
to Figure 3. This layer within the pyramid takes on a new approach in terms of reliability as opposed to the previous two layers. All
work associated with the first two layers is related to basically “fixing it before it breaks”, as depicted by the “planned” domain in
Figure 1.
The focus on the “planned” domain, and without trying to over-simplify it, is about both preventing and/or detecting failures and
then having a system in place to handle the resulting work.
The third layer within the pyramid, again referring to Figure 3, builds on from the foundation work of the first two layers and takes
the focus of reliability to the next level of “don’t just fix it, improve it”, or put another way, seeks to eliminate (altogether) and/or
p rolong the onset of failures. Referring again to Figure 1, this focus on improvement is depicted by the (next) domain of “pro a c t i v e ” .
The organisational culture within the proactive domain is one in which failures are viewed as losses to the overall business hence
root cause is aggressively pursued with a view to eliminating these losses, based on a prioritised approach. In conjunction with
this, the various predictive technologies are also utilised to extend equipment life. These organisations know that reliability is a
function of the way in which the equipment is designed, maintained and operated (or any combination of the three) and seek to
work across these boundaries to improve re l i a b i l i t y. The overall prize / gains to the business are reduced cost of manufacture
(sometimes offset by an increase in maintenance spend). It should be noted however that for the purposes of this paper, it is the
intent to limit the boundaries of the proactive domain to within the key maintenance processes - i.e. maintenance practices and the
engineering department interface.
Proactive maintenance practices include the following:
• Root cause failure analysis (RCFA).
• Precision alignment and balancing.
• Correct start up and shut down practices.
• Lubrication practices.
TRAINING
Training of the maintenance personnel is similar to the preceding key maintenance management processes in that it is an ongoing
and dynamic process. It goes without saying that given the focus on re l i a b i l i t y, training of all personnel within the maintenance
department is a necessity. One can appreciate for example:
• The change required in terms of up-skilling the maintenance trades in the way in which they are now required to perform
their work. Gone are the band-aid repairs of the past reactive world, replaced with the preventative, predictive and proactive
maintenance practices of the future such as laser alignment, balancing of rotating equipment, vibration analysis, oil analysis,
performing regular inspections, the list goes on.
• The requirement to train the maintenance planners in areas such as planning, scheduling, the CMMS, etc.
• The requirement to train supervisors, reliability engineers and middle management in the different (applicable) reliability
functions of the future - i.e. maintenance control (leading and lagging indicators), Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA),
Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM), Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Kaizen, Six Sigma, to name but a few.
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