Is effectiveness killing maintenance teams?

Effectiveness in management is doing the right things or getting the right things done. However, much of our focus is on efficiency and less on becoming effective first. You can do all of the wrong things more efficiently, so should efficiency be our focus? This begs the question, what are the right things? In maintenance, there could be a long list of items that could be considered the right things. So how are the right things determined?

To determine the right things that should be occurring, we have to ask a series of questions:

• Read "Who owns reliability?"

• Do you know what right looks like? “Right” is an understanding of what works and what does not work within a given situation.
• Are you a reactive organization? Being reactive means that you respond to a situation rather than creating or controlling it.
• Does this definition fit the current situation within your organization? This would mean that people respond, normally with a knee-jerk reaction, to any change in a situation. For example, by adding another PM to an asset after a breakdown, or by ordering 12 gearboxes because one failed and there wasn’t one in stock.
• Is your maintenance department reactive? Being reactive in maintenance means that you repair equipment after a breakdown.
• Do you know what you own? Have you defined a proper equipment hierarchy, and is all equipment entered in the CMMS?
• How critical is each piece of equipment to achieving our goals? For critical equipment, how does it fail?
• What will we do to ensure that equipment does not fail, and/or how do we know when it is likely to fail?
• How will we ensure that we continue to improve?
• Do you know how to properly find and address potential failures?
• Do you know the difference between a potential, functional, and catastrophic failure?
• Do you have a failure mode driven strategy? Do you know what a failure mode is?
• Do you plan and schedule work for your maintenance mechanics on a daily basis? Do you know the functions of a planner? A scheduler?

These are just a few questions to determine if you have a few of the right things in place. If you do not have the right things in place, how can you possibly be effective?
How do I know these are the right things? Well, I have read about, studied, and executed on the things that others before have tried and were successful at implementing. I have also learned through this what does not work, and have multiple case studies showing that these things work.

• Read "Is your department under control?"

To be truly effective, here is a list of a few things that must be in place:

1. Organizational goals and objectives. Knowledge of both of these sets the direction for you and your ability to execute within them. For example, if a goal were to cut funding, it will be very hard for you to plan on spending more money this year over last year.
2. An understanding of plant losses.
3. A failure mode driven maintenance strategy. What does this mean and what does this look like?
4. Planning and scheduling of work.
5. Job kitting and job plans for work to be executed.
6. Use of predictive maintenance (PdM) technologies.
7. Use of precision maintenance.
8. Use of failure analysis/Root Cause Analysis.
9. Proper lubrication management.
10. Proper PMs. What are you checking it for, and what condition constitutes replacement? What measurement tools are being used to check condition? What is to be done if the condition is out of tolerance?

Once these basics are in place, you can then shift your focus to making them more efficient.