Maintworld Magazine 3/2021

CASE STUDY
Four levels of success.
questions people will not complete the
survey. If the information you request is
difficult to access, once again, people will
not complete the survey. However, with
1.000 responses, we felt we had good
information to work with.
What is reliability success?
The first challenge was to measure
“success” - what is the definition of a
successful reliability program? In an ideal
world, we would receive detailed financial
information about production output,
maintenance costs, asset value, and
other key information, and we would be
able to normalize it against industry type
– and we would be able to measure the
contribution that reliability improvement
made to those results.. However, as you
may imagine, too few people have that
information, and even fewer are willing
(or able) to share it.
Instead, we chose to go with three
metrics: maintenance cost as a percentage
of asset value, equipment availability,
and the percentage of reactive maintenance.
As it turned out, the information
we received on the first metric was either
unreliable or too few respondents were
able to provide that information. Instead,
we combined the other two metrics so
that we had four levels of success, as
illustrated above.
Our next challenge was to analyze the
data and attempt to determine what the
people in Group 1 did differently to the
other groups. We asked questions about
training, the techniques they use to
develop their reliability strategy, the age
of the program, the software and instrumentation
they used, and many other
factors. But what appeared to come from
the survey was that the programs with
the best culture achieve the best results.
The programs with the strongest management
support had the best culture.
And the programs that developed the
financial business case had the strongest
management support.
Our conclusion, therefore, was that
developing a business case was one of the
root causes of program success.
Do surveys and correlation
prove anything?
Stepping back for a second, it is fair to say
that it can be challenging to distinguish
between causation and correlation.
As I like to point out, global warming is
statistically correlated with the number
of pirates in the world. As the number
of pirates has steadily decreased, the
temperature of the globe has steadily
increased, as illustrated on the next page.
There is a mathematical correlation.
But I think most people would agree that
the size of the population of pirates has
had little to do with global warming.
And thus, it is the same with the
author’s interpretation of the survey results.
Can I say, categorically, that it was
the existence of the business case that
resulted in achieving the support of senior
management? I expected that to be
the case, therefore I may be guilty of
confirmation bias. But a close examination
of the data showed that 95% of the organizations
that have a business case also had
strong senior management support.
It is also true that there may be
other reasons why an organization had
a culture that supported the concept of
reliability improvement. But we did find
that 96% of the organizations that either
had strong or moderate senior management
support had the right culture.
And finally, it is also difficult to prove,
without a doubt, that the nature of the
culture influenced the success achieved
by the reliability improvement program.
But approximately 90 percent of the
organizations in Group 1 reported:
• Everyone understands the benefits
[86%]
• Everyone is encouraged to provide
suggestions for improvement [90%]
• Everyone understands the mission
[95%]
• Everyone is actively engaged [90%]
As mentioned earlier, we examined other
factors, mostly technical, but none of them
achieved the high percentages listed above.
As the owner of an international training
organization, I was disappointed to learn
that the level of training and certification
did not strongly correlate with program
success. Fifty percent of Group 1 and 2 said
they had strong training, skills, and certification
while another 40 percent said they
had “somewhat strong” training, skills, and
certification.
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