Maintworld Magazine 3/2021

RELIABILITY
the leak, then understand why the leak is
happening, then fix the leak, then we can
begin to mop up the water. To provide a
more maintenance-specific example you
don’t need to implement operator care or
autonomous maintenance to free up maintenance
resources for firefighting or emergency
reactive repairs. If that is the world
you are living in, then in essence you are
mopping the floor while the water floods in.
Not only that, but you also look silly asking
operations to be proactive when you and
your maintenance organization are still
fully in the reactive maintenance world.
There is an order in which you need to
implement the elements of reliability and
maintenance improvement. It is not the
same for everyone or every site. You need
to understand your specific issues and reasons
for the change in your organization.
Then, understand the vision for the future
support it. Pick a pilot area. An area where
you can, without a doubt, be successful. If
you are not successful in the pilot area, then
your chances of being able to implement in
other areas diminishes rapidly.
The second big mistake I see here is that
the area that is selected is too risky. The
high-risk selections come from leadership
teams that are trying to solve an issue in a
problem area that might be your problem
area for another reason. For example, “Let’s
improve maintenance in area X because we
need more volume or throughput.” However,
had they really looked to ensure success
and understand the issues, they would have
noticed that this area is running a product
that the equipment was not designed to run
and has a high operational turnover so the
equipment is being told to do things that
it just physically cannot do by unskilled
operators, or maybe they would find that
WITHOUT MAINTENANCE PLANNING, YOUR RELIABILITY
IMPROVEMENT IS DOOMED.
vision and mission and developing the
plan to get to the new level of performance.
Many sites over the years have not taken
the time to really figure out what needs to
happen in order to get to their vision or future
state on time. What do they do? Without
understanding where they truly are,
they just do things. They decide to tackle
random improvement strategies. They get
a list from a book or corporate that is not
tied to the issues at the site or the goals and
vision. I would compare this to trying to
mop the floor dry when we have not identified
where the leak is coming from. You
can mop for days but the water just keeps
coming. You need an order of execution or
a master plan if you will. It should make it
clear that first, we must find the source of
state and let that help you select both the
order and the elements that become part of
your plan.
Creating success
The next area that trips many organizations
up is that they spread themselves too
thinly from an implementation resources
perspective. They try to do everything
everywhere in the organization. In most,
if not all organizations we have limited
people and financial resources and we have
to build our implementation strategy with
that in mind. You should not plan to paint
an entire building with one three-inch
brush and two painters painting a brick
here and a brick there. You could, but most
organizations do not have the patience to
wait on the painted bricks to join up and
generate the results they expect. If I have
one brush and two painters then I am going
to train those painters to be as effective
as possible and then have them tackle one
small section at a time, maybe a wall of 600
bricks, so that the organization can see the
change in that area and imagine what the
change will look like once we paint more.
To put this into maintenance terms, you
don’t want to try and do every facet of reliability
improvement in every area of the
plant all at once. It will not connect, the
vision gets lost, and you likely just cannot
the leadership in that area is disengaged or
unskilled. It would be hard to be successful
with a maintenance improvement strategy
if that is your pilot area.
So, to increase your chances of success,
pick an area that you have the resources to
manage and can guarantee success because
you have the unwavering support of the
area leadership, as an example. Think not
about your bottlenecks or trouble spots
alone, because that is how the trap is set
and then we fall and fail.
Driving a problem-solving
culture
The next area that trips up many is based
on the thinking that problem-solving and
root cause analysis is something you should
start employing after you have data in your
enterprise asset management system, and
you have many of the tenets of reliability
started. This could not be further from the
truth. You have to understand what is at
the root of your past failures during other
implementations or simply why you never
implement at all. You need to know what
has held you back. I also do not mean just
a simple five whys or fishbone either. You
need to understand what we call the systemic
and latent roots. Some refer to these
as organizational roots. What culturally has
distracted or derailed us in the past or what
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