While attending a recent maintenance and reliability conference, I had the opportunity to meet many new faces and rekindle old relationships, both in the workshop I conducted and from our exhibit booth interactions. Functions like this allow me to see a wide range of groups in varying states on their reliability journey over a few days.
I compare their position with the manufacturing plants we visit in our consulting and training activities, and I’m constantly amazed by the cyclic nature of progression – or the lack thereof. Some groups are just starting their journey, without much education in best practices, and often without a foundation. Others emerge on a proactive path, breaking out of the reactive cycle of despair. Some groups have broken free and are very proactive. Lastly, some groups were well on the journey, and due to management focus and shifting priorities, they have fallen back into the primarily reactive domain. Most interesting are the personnel who understand the best practices concepts yet are seemingly handcuffed and accept the status quo.
With many of these individuals, the question is often, “Where do I start or continue?” To that end, this article presents a foundational roadmap with six checkpoints that can yield fast returns for your organization. Realize that while you may be more advanced in your journey, I suspect you, too, may glean some valuable nuggets to implement. I am modeling this roadmap for several organizations struggling to break free from their current state. Let’s begin.
Checkpoint #1: Maintenance planning and scheduling
Establish a formal planning role and staff it with a skilled craftsperson. Clearly define the planner's responsibilities and authority. Train them and maintenance supervision as a minimum on the function. Implement a weekly scheduling meeting with maintenance and production leaders. Create a simple, visual schedule board (if nothing else, use Excel). Start with a one-week look-ahead schedule.
To start, prioritize the work using a simple ranking with a 1-4 scale (emergency, urgent, planned, outage). Begin with basic job planning by creating simple job plans for corrective work, including required parts, tools, and estimated time. Provide a feedback form so technicians can help improve the job plans over time with specifications such as torque, clearances, and belt tension.
Checkpoint #2: Communication and collaboration
Establish a cadence leveraging work process systems to build the partnership between maintenance and operations. Hold a cross-functional meeting weekly to develop work priorities and a weekly maintenance schedule. Ideally, operations will appoint an operations gatekeeper(s) to interface with the maintenance planner(s) and supervisor(s). Discuss potential conflicts between maintenance and production schedules. Review performance metrics together. Develop cross-functional teams of operators and technicians who are empowered to identify and resolve root cause issues and defect elimination.
Checkpoint #3: Improving the equipment maintenance strategies
Most groups perform more preventive maintenance activities than necessary, often without understanding the equipment failure modes they must address. This unnecessary work often is coupled with limited or no condition monitoring or predictive approaches. Both checkpoint #1 (maintenance planning) and this checkpoint are two fundamental areas for improvement that will yield a significant return on investment.
While you may never do a reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) analysis, I strongly encourage you to take an RCM introductory course to understand the framework. In doing so, you will approach PM optimization very differently. With optimization, the failure modes are identified, and tasks are developed to address them in a way that is both technically feasible and worth doing. For condition monitoring tasks, provide specifications that find the potential for failure early enough to plan and schedule the corrective actions to reduce the amount of reactive work. Focus on precision maintenance approaches.
Checkpoint #4: Computerized maintenance management system (CMMS)
Use your CMMS to ensure that the equipment hierarchy is correctly identified using parent-child relationships down to the lowest appropriate level. When possible, write work orders to the child asset (i.e., the motor as opposed to the cartoner) to build good equipment history. Leverage failure codes as well to assist in understanding opportunities for improvement. Adhere to the concept of “no work order, no work or parts” to help understand where asset issues exist and reduce MRO storeroom stockouts.
Checkpoint #5: The maintenance playbook
Begin with basic standard work procedures such as planned work execution. Document the process workflows and RACIs, training personnel in the processes. Audit three work orders each week to ensure that the processes are working. Use the audits to look for continuous improvement opportunities.
Checkpoint #6: Establish performance measures
In addition to operations measures like overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), establish maintenance execution metrics such as labor utilization, PM compliance, schedule compliance, schedule breakers, and planned vs. unplanned work to capture and show improving trends over time. It's all too common to find organizations without meaningful measures and targets for improvement.
While this roadmap is far from comprehensive, it provides a base-level starting point for individuals and their organizations to better their journey in maintenance and reliability practices.
