Reliable Plant July August 2008

BTLs lead the way, but the plant’s open,
empowerment-heavy culture allows
freedom to find methods that achieve the
vision. It goes back to the employees’ roots.
Diverse personal experiences allow the
plant and its teams to implement some of
the best ideas in industry.
“Reliability of the equipment and how
we monitor it and how we check for it has
been basically the same as everything else
here – it’s the blended best practices from
everywhere that we’ve been,” says Regula.
“How did you do it at your plant? What
worked there? What didn’t? What was a
waste of time? What did you measure?
How did you measure it, and why?”
One technician may have come from a
80-person plant that developed an innovative
way to increase the life of its pumps (or
bearings or gearboxes). Another may have
seen superior practices for lubrication (or
electrical safety or belt repairs) at a 700-
employee site. Yet another may have
created a neat way to ensure shaft alignment
at his former five-man shop.
Communication brings these best practices
to light.
COME TOGETHER
The Navistar plant has seen numerous
benefits by physically locating maintenance
resources inside of an assembly line
or group of machining cells.
One is a closer technician-operator relationship
than you find at plants with a
dichotomous, “we/they” structure.
“There is more communication here,” says
Assembly business team technician Jimmy
Jones, another ex-Copeland Compressors
worker. “That leads to more trust and understanding.
We look out for one another.”
Sibley tightens the bonds by bringing coworkers
together outside the plant. The
plant has a city league softball team (28
players are on the roster), bass fishing
tournaments and golf scrambles.
Communication leads to less downtime.
“You hear about issues before they
lead to problems,” says Jones. “If I was
located at the other end of the plant, the
operator may not bring it up. That
perceived ‘little’ noise may be something
important and we missed an opportunity
to address it. But because I’m right here,
they bring things to my attention and I
can check it out.”
Other benefits include quicker response
time than you’d find at a traditional large
plant, and a deeper level of ownership and
knowledge from the maintenance group.
“These are my babies,” says Jones about
the equipment in his area. “I know these
machines like the back of my hand.”
All of this contributes to minimal downtime.
Most plant areas have uptime figures
exceeding 90 percent. When a breakdown
does occur, the impact is, more often than
not, minimal.
“We’re pretty fast,” says Sibley. “It’s
really, really major for us if we lose 20
minutes on a problem. It’s the quick
response and reaction that sets us apart.”
HANDS-ON OPERATIONS
The unique method of maintenance
doesn’t stop with the technicians.
Operators play a sizable role in machine
performance and reliability. This goes way
beyond the traditional Total Productive
Maintenance tasks of operators cleaning
equipment and reading gauges.
At the Navistar facility in Huntsville,
operators can take on any maintenance job
that they have the time and skills to do.
That job list includes preventive, predictive,
proactive and reactive maintenance.
In the Machining business team,
planner Chris Glasscock (a former
Wolverine Tubing Company worker)
prints out a list of work orders each day
from the plant’s Avantis.PRO computerized
maintenance management software
system. He hands them out to the
resource leaders, who then deliver them to
technicians and operators.
In between running two machines on the
line, operators perform daily, weekly,
monthly, quarterly and/or semi-annual PM
jobs. They grease and lubricate, fill
hydraulic systems, change tooling, remove
metal chips and do many additional
preventive tasks.
Work orders are completed, given to a
technician for sign-off and returned to
Glasscock for closing in the CMMS.
Similarly, in Assembly, operators do
predictive work such as executing audit
checks on the torque consistency of DC
tools, performing tests for leak and pressure
decay, and using ultrasonic tools to
confirm the integrity of bolts, multi-spindles
and critical joints.
“The person doing the work has the
responsibility of tracking the data and
looking at what the data is telling us,” says
Regula. “We want to identify an anomaly
before it becomes an issue.”
If an equipment breakdown occurs, the
operator does not holler for a technician
and then go on break. If the operator’s skill
set, experience and classroom training
allow, he or she may personally handle a
more minor fix and get the equipment back
up and running.
In general, as Sibley says, “There are no
rules that say who can’t do this.” However,
there are some defined boundaries.
Operators can’t open electrical panels,
fiddle with automation equipment or work
on the mission-critical IQA (integrated
quality assurance) machines.
“Complex machines and devices are
maintenance’s specialty,” says Regula. “If
something is wrong with that machine, the
operator will quickly get a maintenance
person to come help solve that issue. It
doesn’t mean that the operator is excluded
from the problem-solving process, because
he or she is an important part of the
process. That is above what we expect
standard assembly operators to have
knowledge on.”
If the operator isn’t taking the lead role
on a breakdown, he or she plays the part of
a surgical room nurse.
“You take your direction from the maintenance
folks,” says Regula. “It’s ‘hold this
in place’, ‘grab that part from the cart’ or
‘help me with this or that.’”
Operators also work to make maintenance
more proactive within their team by:
• systematically tracking downtime to identify
trends;
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