Five Thing You Will Never Hear in a World Class Reliability Organization

After listening to a lot of best practice presentations last week at the SMRP Conference last week I was thinking... Here are five things I did not hear:

5. "We do not have time for PMs this month."
The good guys live and die by their load leveled and failure mode based preventive maintenance (pm) schedule. The best practice facilities complete the PMs on their due date or within plus or minus five percent of their interval. For example for a thirty day PM you have plus or minus 1.5 days from the due date. 

4. "Why buy new when you can go get the parts you need from the boneyard."
The problem with boneyard parts is the lack of history, lack of quality, the presence of existing failure modes and the lack of care in removal and installation. These parts are in many cases like installing a time bomb that has been ticking for a long time. It is just a matter of seconds before they wreck something.

3. "We got every bit of the life out of that bearing."
Predictive maintenance and the technologies like vibration, and ultrasonic are for identifying faults and enabling the planning and scheduling process. They are not for measuring bearing vibration so that you can run it all the way down the P-F curve and use it up. Said simply: PdM is not about improving or empowering your run to failure strategy.

2. "The root cause was that it is your fault."
If your organization lives in a culture of blame then you can not have an effective root cause analysis program. You have to move past the human roots and begin to understand the systemic and latent roots. W Edward Deming said it best when he said "blame the system not the people" To learn more check out this post.

1. "Yea its planned and scheduled for whenever I get to it."
The planned work and the schedule the become are absolutely crucial in the quest for reliability. It allows you to begin to create a partnership between maintenance and operations that is built on the trust that operations will give you the equipment for scheduled down time and maintenance will return it based on the schedule. Without planned work you can not get the efficiency gains expected from your work force and you can not get the results from other parts of your program like PdM and materials management.


Hope you have not heard these recently and you are enjoying the fruits of overall asset reliability. If your not then shoot me an email and lets talk about it.