Maintworld 1/2018

MAINTENANCE MANAGEMEMT
Are you Spending More
Time on Technology than
on Processes and People?
A common reason why reliability and maintenance improvement initiatives often do
not generate the expected achievable results is competing priorities and focusing on
the wrong things.
CHRISTER
IDHAMMAR,
Founder & CEO
IDCON INC,
info@idcon.com.
A GREAT EXAMPLE of this is technology.
Technology is good and necessary and
maintenance people like technology. It
is common that the improvement effort
will focus on technology instead of
processes and people. There are many
stories about engineers and these stories
almost always make fun of our personalities.
For example: “How do you
know an engineer is extrovert?” “The
engineer looks at your shoes, instead of
their own shoes when they talk to you”.
Many engineers are used to working
with facts in designs and specifications.
In a maintenance organization, you will
have to manage people with different
opinions and all that come with that.
A new vibration analyzer, a handheld
data collector for inspections or an online
condition monitoring system are all
good and valid technologies, but if they
are not used by qualified people, in a
well-defined and executed process, the
possible improvement from the use of
these technologies will be absent.
For the example above there would
be processes to do vibration analyses
and inspections, with the right methods
and frequencies, and a work management
process to prioritize, plan and
schedule the corrective action from failures
found using these technologies.
As mentioned before it is relatively
easy to develop, document and communicate
the processes. To instill a culture
32 maintworld 1/2018
to execute work in these processes takes
much more effort and time.
This will include the education and
training of people to achieve awareness,
understanding and skills.
To sustain craft skills to perform precision
maintenance repairs, it is important
to first implement the basic processes
of inspections and work management
in order to reduce reactive work. When
that is done, people should be trained in
precision maintenance repairs.
If not done in this order, the people
trained will fall back into reactive maintenance.
In a reactive mode, too much
work is urgent so there will not be time
to do for example precision alignment.
The skills acquired during training
will be lost and people will be disappointed.
In summary: Most people know
what to do, but cannot find the time to
do it. As Illustration1 describes. Too
many conflicting priorities are common
reason for this. If you implement and
execute the basic reliability and maintenance
processes and execute them well,
you will free up time to do what you do
not have time to do today.
Christer Idhammar, is Founder and CEO
of IDCON INC a reliability and maintenance
consulting firm headquartered in
the United States with partners in Norway,
Finland, Italy, Germany, Australia,
and South America.
TECHNOLOGY IS GOOD AND NECESSARY AND MAINTENANCE
PEOPLE LIKE TECHNOLOGY.
Illustration 1: I don’t have
time to fix the fence. I have
too many chickens to catch.
©IDCON INC