Podcast: Are excuses and negativity killing your plant’s reliability program?

Joe Kuhn, CMRP, former plant manager, engineer, and global reliability consultant, is now president of Lean Driven Reliability LLC. He is the author of the book “Zero to Hero: How to Jumpstart Your Reliability Journey Given Today’s Business Challenges” and the creator of the Joe Kuhn YouTube Channel, which offers content on starting your reliability journey and achieving financial independence. In our monthly podcast miniseries, Ask a Plant Manager, Joe considers a commonplace scenario facing the industry and offers his advice, as well as actions that you can take to get on track tomorrow. This episode offers insight into how to create reliability buy-in at all levels of the plant.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

PS: Okay, so in your consulting work, you've probably heard a lot of excuses about why reliability practices don't work. ‘We've tried the best practices here. They don't work for us. We’re different.' So what are some of the common excuses that you hear for why reliability practices don't work? How do you convince them to give it a try?

The negativity may be coming from many different levels. Maybe the C-suite doesn't buy into reliability. Maybe the technicians aren't excited about reliability practices. Perhaps the technicians are too busy fixing emergencies, and they can't support reliability practices. Maybe your supervisors think the work crews are lazy. Or are they actually part of a bad system? So at what level do you most often see resistance to reliability practices? And how do you get everyone excited about the reliability journey at all levels?

JK: Well, there's a lot in there, Anna, a lot to tackle. First thing I'll say is nearly everybody says we've tried reliability best practices. ‘We tried them in the 90s. We tried them in the early 2000s, and it just didn't work here. We didn't get the impact that we were expecting. We were excited at first, and we just didn't get the results. And then, we moved on to other things.’ That is extremely common to hear excuses. ‘We don't have enough money right now. We don't have the staffing we need. We need to fill five technicians and two planners, and we're trying to hire a manager. Whatever it is, not enough money, not enough people. Those are the most common ones. ‘Okay, we have too many initiatives going on. Well, as soon as things slow down with our emergency work, since we get caught up on that, we'll start. We've got this brand-new safety audit coming our way.’ 

There's never a good time to start a culture change. And to me, the negativity or the pushback comes from everyone. The technicians, they're used to what they've got. They're used to the amount of work. They're used to the amount of overtime. When you look at the C-suite, they want quick results. And if you do a reliability deployment the traditional way, it can take a lot of time. Sometimes people tell you, 2, 3, 4 years before you see a substantial impact, and that just doesn't solve it at all. We've made other podcasts on that. What people do wrong, and this is almost universal (I'm wanting to say I've never seen someone do this right) is when you look at reliability best practices, people learn them at a conference, they learn them at a seminar, learn them in a book, and then they just, one by one, start implementing those best practices, whether it's planning and scheduling, whether it's PMs, whether it's problem solving. There are all the best practices that are out there using condition monitoring, but the first place you need to start, and this is almost always skipped over, is you have to know the waste that's in your plant. What's the inefficiency that's in your plant? And then you apply the tool, the best practice, to that waste. That is the key to getting fast results that have an impact on the business. You have to know what waste is in your plant. 

For example, if you are doing an excellent job on planning and scheduling right now. The crews know what work they're going to do, the operations know what work they're going to do. You have all the parts and pieces in place, and it's executed pretty well. Why would you study planning best practices first? Why would you do that first when it's going to have a minimal impact? May take you from an A to an A+, to use a grading system. Where you may have a bigger problem is with problem solving; you're doing no problem solving at all. Why not start there? So the common error that people make is they just start randomly deploying. Depending on who you're getting information from, there's between 15 and 27 best practices out there. Those will have a random result. You've got to apply the solution which is the best practice to the problem you have in your plant. 

So where to start? In your plan, go out and observe. And when I say observe, that means go out and look at a planned job. You planned a job for Tuesday. Go out and watch that job and see how efficient it is. What I find, the most common number I find of wrench time, or efficiency, just a measure of efficiency, it's about 15%. You'll find that these people are searching around for tools. They're searching around for equipment. They're searching for parts production, still using the equipment. They leave it in the wrong condition; they didn't put it in this crane in the right way. They didn't clean up a certain thing, and all these comedy of errors. And then the people work on the job. They get the work done in an hour and a half, and you charge eight hours to it because of these inefficiencies. So start gathering observational data on what reality is like. Don't assume jobs go perfectly. Go and see and when you have to watch a job for four hours or eight hours, I'm telling you, you understand the waste better, and then you'll know the tool to apply.