You Have Two Minutes: Refining Your Reliability Elevator Pitch

Have you ever been caught with only a few minutes to explain why a focus on reliability or maintenance improvement is critical to your organization and it's future? It happens very often. Your ability to explain why the leadership should care, and what you need to make it happen, is the key to moving your agenda forward. Lets look at 3 key points to nail if you want support and resources.
First, speak their language. What keeps them up at night? Is it the dollars and cents or the concern over risk? Is it getting more production out or controlling the cost on the current deliveries? Think about what you can give them with reliability that addresses their concern in their language.
 Seconded, carefully deliver a positive and practiced narrative. Watch your body language. Is it closed and confined or open and believable? Are you looking at your shoes our engaging the receiver. Are you using words like "could" "should"  and "might" or "will"  and "when"? If you don't believe it why should they?
Lastly, have a format. I like one I call "hook, story, ask!" Hook them with something they care about. Something from the first point above preferably. Then tell them a story about what is happening currently or what could happen in the future. (use emotion if you sense they are emotional receptive) and then do not forget the ask. You have to ask for their support, or resources. Be specific in your request and make it time bound if possible.
We have to sell reliability and maintenance improvement and only those of us who have seen or heard what good looks like and believe in the power can get it started. Frame it in their language and meet their needs, show them that you believe what you are saying and do not forget the "hook, story, ask!" Now go get'em tiger.

The Lens of Reliability

During some of our recent reliability improvement implementations, I have noticed a phenomenon that I think might add some perspective and help with your implementations. I call it the "Lens of Reliability" but it could really effect any big deal change to an organization that is being made from within.
It is most obvious to me in the first 3-4 months of the improvement project. It is two ways of seeing your world. The first is from your current lens or as I will refer to it, your reactive lens. The second is the future lens or as I will refer to it the proactive lens. Why do these lenses matter? They matter because they effect your ability to create a best practice future state business processes. They matter because they effect your teams ability to see a clear future state. They matter because once you know they are there, you can call them out and deal with them and move forward more effectively.
Let me explain them in the context of a business process re-engineering session. You as the facilitator or leader are discussing that we need failure codes for all emergency work orders and a team member says "we cant do that. It will take to long to put that on all the work orders". That individual is looking through the reactive lens and they are seeing the problem from the current state. In their world they know that they have 100s of emergency work orders and they will never "get all the paper work done". We need them to look at it from the future perspective and see that if we do this, the system will reduce the number of emergency work orders through tools like root cause analysis, preventive (PM) and predictive maintenance (PdM). The data will drive the improvement and will get us to the new point where the systems supports the proactive lens. Here are some examples through each lens:

Reactive lens:

• I need a technician standing in every area waiting on a break down
• I need every spare part in the store room for the emergencies
• I need to limit time collecting data so I can get all the real work done.  

Proactive lens:

• Technicians work on planned and schedule work and don't just stand in the area waiting for a failure to happen and on top of that, more improvements and repair get completed reducing emergency and unplanned failures for the future.
• The storeroom inventory can be lower because we identify failures early with PM and PdM giving us time to order the parts for the planned and scheduled repairs.
• The data we collect allows us to identify reoccurring failures and eliminate, reduce or mitigate the failures reducing emergency work in the future. 

I hope this perspective helps with your implementation. When you see someone looking through the reactive lens don't be afraid to call it out, discuss it, and then determine the best path forward.  It will be hard at first but if you do not address it you will end up with sub-optimized processes and practices that do not support the future.

Choose the right lens!

FMEA, and RCA, Got You Overwhelmed, and Paralyzed?

I get it, Failure Modes Effects Analysis (FMEA) and Root Cause Analysis (RCA) are hard or at the very least hard to execute consistently. If you look at the amount of them that you need to do or should do, it can be quite overwhelming. Many sites get paralyzed by this and do very little or nothing with these very important tools. Just like many of the other elements we talk about that are needed for reliability improvement, it is critical to create a plan and set an expectation. It must be broken in into manageable bite size pieces. 

For sites that are just beginning to complete RCAs and FMEAs I often suggest the following goal: What if each reliability engineer or maintenance engineer committed to one FMEA and 2 RCAs per month? Would this be doable in your organization? The expectation is that these would be good quality FMEAs of 200 lines or more and RCAs that are more than 5 whys or fish bones. They all need to be taken through implementation and follow up even if that portion occurs after the month they are scheduled in. I would suggest that FMEA be selected based on "leveragability." What I mean by that is, select your target assets not just based on criticality or failure rate but also based on how many assets that you can apply the FMEA against while developing equipment maintenance plans and systemic improvements. Think of it as, what assets can I get the most bang for the buck?

If your site were to adopt this goal and execute on it then by the end of the year you would have 12 FMEAs implemented and 24 problems addressed with RCA for each reliability or maintenance engineer.  Imagine the change in performance you would experience with this volume of issues leaving the system. 

I get it, these tools can be overwhelming, but if you set a goal and hold each other accountable then your organization can be substantially better than most of your competition within the first year.