How to earn plant manager buy-in: The importance of credibility and effective resource allocation

Everyone at your plant is trying to get time, money, and resources from the plant manager. As a plant manager I would get five new requests a week to sponsor. Typical pleas were: we need to hire more production workers, we must have this quality improvement project, or we need to replace this obsolete control system. Resources are always limited, and lack of focus will lead to poor results. How does the plant manager decide what to sponsor?

How do you make decisions? How do you decide which contractor to use to put in a new pool? How do you select a financial advisor? How do you choose which headphones to purchase from Amazon? In a word: Creditability. You ask for references to give firsthand testimony and with Amazon, you look at the online reviews. It is no different with your plant’s leadership team, they look at your track record of delivering results. How effectively are you using the resources already provided? What is your creditability?

As a plant manager deciding what to sponsor, I had “needs” and “wants.” Needs included: fast results (the business expects quarter over quarter improvement), high confidence in the outcome, meaningful impact, and alignment with company and personal values. Wants included: Scalable sustainable results  and engaging for the workforce.

As the reliability leader for your site, you propose to begin a reliability journey, which you estimate will deliver $3 million per year from increased uptime, improved quality, and lower costs. But the results will not come until year four. You need to invest $1 million per year for three years to get best practices in place through training, hiring new roles, buying spare parts and getting the equipment in a maintainable state. Looks reasonable; $3 million invested with $3 million per year returned. Where do I sign?

Not so fast. Let’s take a look at current state creditability of the maintenance organization. Imagine this describes your plant:

• 90% unplanned work
• 15% PM compliance
• 0% condition monitoring techniques employed
• wrench time is under 15%
• 15% increased costs per year
• a blaming culture between operations, maintenance, and engineering.

How creditable is your organization? How believable is the pitch to deploy best practices for $3 million dollars with a return of $3 million per year? Pretty low on both accounts, right? Any wonder why your plant manager cut costs, implements a hiring freeze, and cancels overtime when the business is stressed and needs better numbers? This latter list is known to produce very short-term results with high confidence. If your plant manager implements such changes, it is a reflection of creditability of the organization to produce a better plan.

Are we then doomed because of our past performance? No; there is a solution that has consistently worked for me. First, you must embrace these truths:

1. Every reliability best practice is designed to eliminate waste. Why do we plan work? Answer: to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of work crews. Why do we perform PMs? Answer: to increase product quality, increase uptime, and lower costs.
2. Focus best practice deployment on the biggest wastes in your plant.
3. The only way to know the wastes in your plant is by intense observation on the factory floor (a process called “Chalk Circle Observation”). Observation time should be a minimum of 4 hours (Longer is better).
4. Observation will reveal simple, impactful, and rapidly deployed solutions that most often are free to implement.

From these truths, create a mantra of, “We attack waste.” Reliability and maintenance best practices are the “How.” Attacking wastes is universally understood and appropriate throughout all business cycles. You will automatically have leadership attention. What is next is to provide success stories to establish momentum, enthusiasm, and creditability.

Waste is everywhere in every plant; however, you must stop what you are doing and look for it. This is where “Chalk Circle” changes everything. It is one thing to see waste for five minutes and “write it off” as an anomaly; it is quite a different experience to wallow in the inefficiency for four, eight or 12 hours. Examples:

1. Over scheduling manpower: A planned job to replace a vacuum tube on an overhead crane can be performed by two people in four hours. The planner plans the job with four people for eight hours in case the crew runs into problems or gets pulled off to execute emergency work.
   Result: wrench time is dramatically lower (32 hours actual versus 8 possible). Secondly, assuming emergency work will pull the work crew from the planned job is hiding wastes.
   Action: A best practice is to separate planned work crews from unplanned crews.
2. Full job kitting: You observe two mechanics just driving around on their scooter. They appear to be wasting time. However, you discover they are looking for key stock that is needed on a new pump installation. The planned job kit only consisted of the new pump.
   Result: The craftsmen were predestined to search out a new coupling, key stock, shims and anything else needed to execute the work. The plan was doomed to fail. Consequently, the planner doubled the time to complete the job from two hours to four hours based on past performance.
   Action: This waste can easily be eliminated for zero cost by doing “full kitting and staging.” With full kitting and staging, the expectation is to have every part, tool, and piece of equipment needed waiting at the job site before the work begins. Kits are verified correct and complete before work is scheduled.
3. Production failure to release equipment on time: You observe a crane wire rope change. The work was scheduled to begin at 7:00 a.m., but production was still using the crane. Production informed the crew they would call on the radio when they can have the crane. Management sees the maintenance crew in the lunchroom at 8:00 a.m. and concludes the crew is lazy. The crane is finally turned over to maintenance at 9:30 a.m.
   Result: Work is completed by noon; three hours longer than expected. The planner then revises the time to complete this job to five hours in effect hiding the waste.
   Action: Production must be committed to maintenance efficiency and become partners. Begin by tracking the number of events per day where equipment is not ready for planned work. From this data, ask for a 90-day trial of commitment to the maintenance schedule. After the 90 days discuss the results. Expect to be amazed.

These three examples were real in my plant. All were free and rapidly implemented. Imagine the impact of finding and fixing one of these a week for a year. It will be huge! Further, this will deliver all the plant manager “needs”: fast, high confidence in the outcome, meaningful impact, and alignment with company and personal values; and all her “wants”: Sustainable results, scalable, engaging for the workforce. Creditability has been earned.

Implementing reliability and maintenance best practices is optional for the plant manager. Appropriately proving and selling best practices as a waste elimination machine changes everything.