Podcast: Why process management is key to reducing drift and improving operational efficiency

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 process management and avoiding the drift away from standards.

Below is an excerpt of the podcast:

PS: So in your last column of the year, you wrote about process management, and you said nothing had more business impact in the operations where you had worked.

Standards and procedures are what uphold your processes, keep them efficient, but that's often a big challenge for facilities, and they drift from standards over time. So to start, why is this such a challenge for facilities to stop that drift from happening?

JK: Yeah, first of all, drift. I want to make sure everybody understands what drift is. So you come out with a procedure on how you're going to make a product, and it's got five steps. Everybody's following that on Monday, and then by Friday, people have found shortcuts, and you're doing four and a quarter steps. Then, all of a sudden, you start to have quality problems or output problems. That's what drift is. It's a slow shift from the best practice to something else later that can cause problems.

Why is it a problem with drift? Well, most organizations that I've worked with and lived in, there's a lot going on. You've got environmental issues. You’ve got safety issues, quality issues, production issues. You’ve got profit issues. There are a lot of priorities coming at a plant. The issue of the day. ‘Hey, this motor failed. Oh, why did that motor failed? Well, it failed because we didn't lubricate the last six months. No lubrication. Okay.’ The plant manager comes out and says, ‘I want a PM that says we're going to lubricate that every six every month,’ whatever it happens to be, and use ultrasonic lubrication or something like that. Then, you put that in your CMMS system, and problem solved, onto the next issue.

Well, sometimes we're not always 100% PM compliant. We're 95% or we're 90%. There are some organizations at 50%. I've talked to facilities at 20%. Well, if you're 50% PM compliant, what are the 50% you're not doing? Well, it could be this motor. It could be that the most critical process in your plant, is the missing lubrication. Okay, so how do focus? It's very difficult, I'll say, impossible for the plant manager, the engineering manager, the maintenance manager, the production manager, to focus on one thing. You're always juggling 30 balls. And I'm just declaring a weakness. You can't focus on it. So that's the problem in facilities, too many priorities coming at you, and the urgent always trumps the strategic. And what I mean by that is this week, it was this motor, and we all make a commitment. ‘We're going to do these four PM tasks on that motor and never have that happen again.’ Well, then Monday comes, and we have problems with a gearbox, or we have problems with the belts. We have quality problems, and so we forget about that. Sometimes we even forget to enter the PM into the CMMS to track it, because tomorrow's a brand-new day. That's the problem, and process management solves that.

PS: In this column, you outlined some very specific roles that are needed for process management. I wanted to outline those for our listeners here today. So the first thing: a process manager, whose responsibility is to control whatever specific process we're looking at. The quality systems manager, who owns the whole process management system, guides the process managers and also audits systems for compliance and reporting. And then, the sponsor, who is a higher level executive with an active role in process management, who also audits the systems quarterly.

I think another important part that I took away from that article about process management is the part about defining what specific process you want to manage. You suggest segmenting your critical practices down to very small yet critical processes. So how do you begin to identify those critical processes and break them down into manageable pieces? And can you walk us through a specific manufacturing example and talk us through some of those positions that I mentioned before, too.

JK: Most people in maintenance organizations know their top reliability issues. It’s the phone calls you get at midnight, at 2 a.m., on Christmas day. Those top ones that cause reliability, many of those are also the same ones that cause production and quality issues, and they also are costs. So as a plant, it's pretty easy to sit around a conference room and say, ‘Oh, hey, these motors or these pumps, they're number one or number two every year.’

I'm going to use a pump example, as I walk through here. ‘Hey, we’ve got these coolant pumps. We’ve got 10 of them. And we spend $200,000 a year on these things, and 5% of our total downtime is these 10 pumps, and they're just a pain.’ It's fairly easy to say, here's a process we want to manage. When you get into it, and again, I'll use this pump example, we want a process manager. The best process managers are like a mechanic. Okay, so you’ve got a mechanic that maybe works in the coolant house. He's got a lot of ideas, and you’re looking for 30 minutes to maybe 90 minutes a week for this person to dedicate to owning the reliability of these coolant pumps.

Now, what's owning? It means this person verifies and, first of all, makes sure that we know how to pack these pumps, so they don't leak. So what's the packing material? Where do we buy it from? What are the standards for that packing material, and how do you put it in? That person owns that. How often do you lube it? With what lube? What's the procedure for lubing? When you install it, how do you balance it? What are the procedures for that? Any design changes to the system that you needed? ‘Hey, this pump system, the foundation is not strong enough.’ Maybe we need to change the inlet piping, the outlet piping. Maybe there's something going on there, but this person owns that little slice of the business, coolant pumps, and you give them time to do that.

In the plan, you say, ‘Okay, John the mechanic, we're going to give him two hours every Wednesday to manage this process.’ So that person audits the incoming material. He audits somebody, maybe it's himself, but typically it's not himself. ‘Hey, I'm going to watch somebody packing this pump. A lot of times these pumps aren't the same manufacturer. So which one's best when we have to buy a new one? Do we buy the cheapest or we buy the one that has the best reliability, best design?’ So that's what the process manager defines, all those standards, and audits it.

Now the quality system manager. They’re the coaches to the process manager. Are you monitoring your incoming materials? Are you monitoring your results? What's the reliability of each pump? What's cost per year of each pump? Do you have an auditing process? Are you going out there once a week, once a month, and auditing somebody rebuilding a pump? Those are the processes that were put in place, and you have an external audit. And the quality systems manager, we call it quality systems manager, because we just tied this in with our quality process or the quality of the external product. It was the same process applied to maintenance.

So a sponsor, why do you need a sponsor? This is somebody high up in the organization. Maybe it's the manufacturing manager, maybe it's the plant manager. The plant manager needs to be part of some of these audits. Now, if you have 100 process managers out there, you may participate in 10 a month, 10 audits a month, where I would sit down with the process manager. ‘What's going on? What help do you need to do better? Hey, great job. You've reduced the cost 25% or 30% increase the reliability,’ whatever the results have been. ‘How can you go faster? What do you need from me?’ The approval. ‘Hey, I need help from purchasing. Purchasing wants to buy this cheap packing material. I want this material. I need you to contact the purchasing manager and tell them to stop bothering me.’ So that's what a sponsor does.

What's great about process management, this makes the problem solving and the standards consistent through time. This is what we did at my previous employer. It would be the first thing I did at a plant is I would divide up, especially in reliability and maintenance, I would divide up the critical processes and create process managers that had their eyes on the ball. So in this example, John's watching pumps, and when he starts getting concerned about pumps, he raises his hand and says, ‘Hey, I know we're not having any reliability issues now, but we've changed the packing material. I'm really concerned about this. Or we've got a few new mechanics that aren’t doing this right? We're not balancing anymore, or we're not doing a quality job balancing shafts.’ So this person is the scout seeing problems in advance when they're small, and that's critical about process management.

So I walked through that example of pumps. This individual, John, owns the pumps. The quality system manager is the coach there, making sure we have all the procedures in place. What do you want to report on each month? Do you have corrective action plan? If things go wrong, like if a pump failed, here's a corrective action form. Everybody in the plant uses the same corrective action form. What are we going to do about it? You want to change packing material. Here's a change form. So creating discipline in place after the problem solving. So, in most organizations, I started every day is a new day. We say we want to do these new PMs as a corrective action to this motor failing. We say we want to do that. Process management puts in the structure and the discipline to do that for the next 25 years.

PS: And I like that there's buy in at all the levels from everyone that you need to get these things done. When you talk about breaking things down, I have to relate this to parenting for a minute. So bear with me. But when my kids are overwhelmed by cleaning their rooms, which is often because they do not have good daily standards and procedures for keeping it clean, I'll tell them, break it down into manageable pieces, because the whole mess is too overwhelming. You’ve got to break it down into individual tasks. So on the manufacturing floor, then you've got everyone who has been an individual owner of their own processes, and then they become the eyes watching that small slice that they own of the business.

JK: Now one error or misjudgment that some of the listeners may have, they go into this and say, ‘Oh, great. Let's give the mechanic more to do. They're going to be delighted by that. They're already busy.’ I'm telling you, that's an error. They will love this. They will love the ownership. They will take pride in what they're doing. They will love their jobs more. Job satisfaction goes up. We conducted surveys and had dramatic improvement in their job satisfaction, being a part of the business. It was huge. Because think about, why does a person become a mechanic, electrician, a trades person? They want things to run well. They want their ideas implemented. They want their ideas heard. Well, guess what? You become a process manager. You have access to the plant manager, the production manager, you've got a coach and a quality systems manager, and your voice is listened to and the solutions are implemented. I'm telling you, don't make the mistake of thinking we can't load people up with ownership, because they will love it.

PS: Everybody wants ownership in their job, I think, important point. Al right, Joe, well, thank you. That'll do it for this episode. Thanks again for joining us.

JK: I'm excited for the next opportunity. I love trying to help people from my mistakes and learnings over time.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.