The Victimization of Maintenance

How many of you have heard or said the following:

• "I could be more reliable if I had operation's support."
• "We would suffer less downtime if I had more people."
• "If corporate would give us a CMMS (eAM) that worked I could reduce my maintenance cost."
• "If my equipment weren't so old, I could compete with the other plants."
• "I would plan the work but my eAM makes it too hard to plan and schedule." 
• "If I could find maintenance technicians in our area I could improve compliance."
• "We would have less emergency failures if my manager would approve the money for predictive tools."
• I would improve my preventive maintenance if I had the time. 

I could go on but you get the gist, in maintenance just like many other disciplines it can be very easy to play the "victim card." When this happens, you have given yourself and your organization permission not to act. This really becomes an excuse to fail or at the very least stay stagnant. I hear many of these quotes regularly from sites all over the globe, heck, I have even said them a few times when caught in a moment of frustration. Today I want to give one quick example of a potential way to get past victimization and make progress and challenge you to look for your workarounds for your problems. I'm not discounting that sites have things that are holding them back in some way, but more often than not with a bit of focus and perseverance there is likely a work around that can allow for improvement.
One common complaint is around eAM or CMMS functionality issues in the area of job planning.  Sites say they can not create effective job plans and store them in the CMMS for execution. This takes on many different flavors from formatting issues and graphics issues to difficulty in using the task with other jobs in the future. In many cases though, when I look at what has been done, I can only find a few attempts where jobs have been effectively planned.
Just as one oversimplified example to get you thinking, one work around is a job plan library outside of the CMMS or eAM with links where possible. I know this sounds a bit counter common thought but 400 job plans in a library outside of the CMMS is a lot better than only two job plans in the CMMS.  These can be job plans that are created in Word and saved within a file structure by asset class on a server or on a file sharing site like SharePoint. This gives you a real job plan library with no formatting restrictions that you can link to the work orders or if that is a problem for you then they can be printed and attached to the physical work orders for delivery to the technician. This also gives you job plans that your planners can cut and paste task from to create more job plans further building out the library.
Please do not be paralyzed by waiting on perfection. Throw down that victim card. Sometimes you just need to just find a way that meets the over arching goal with in the restrictions that we have.

Blankets Are For Children Not Work Orders

Do you use and excessive amount of blanket work orders in your CMMS or eAM? Have you defined excessive? Do you have rules as to what can be on a blanket work order? Let's take a few minutes to talk about what blankets are and why you don't want too many in your eAM. Blanket work orders can contain or become a slush fund of hours and materials spend that leads to very poor asset management decisions. Why you say? Many organizations create them so that they can enter their maintenance time or order parts very quickly in the eAM. Capturing your time of course, is very good, but if it is not charged to a specific work order with an associated asset or piece of equipment then it does not provide much information on failure rates, recurrences, or historical cost. One reason we have an eAM is to be able to see labor and parts consumption by asset or piece of equipment so that we can then make good business decisions when it comes to replacement and refurbishment. If the cost to inspect a line or to repair a breakdown is going to a blanket work order then likely it is not being charged to an asset. Over the years, I have seen blanket work orders written at the area or line level with hundreds of hours of labor and hundreds of random parts assigned to them. None of that spend is hitting the asset history and none of those parts are associated with the equipment bill of materials.
There are times when a blanket work order makes sense. A few examples would be for tracking training hours for a team of techs or for tracking time used for operations support or even tracking morning meeting time. In these cases, we are not losing historical data and in fact are tracking a meaningful metric with the blanket work order.
The best way I have seen to limit the creation of blanket work orders is to ask yourself these two questions before you create one: 

• Does this need to be charged to the asset for historical cost reporting? 
• Would we want to know how often this reoccurs at the asset level? 

If yes, then create the specific individual work order tied to the specific asset or piece of equipment. So its not that all blankets are bad but their is a good and bad way to use them. Are you using them where they add value or where they obscure the very data we need to make good decisions?

You Can Not Cost Cut Your Way To Prosperity. Guest Post: Allen Canaday

We are excited to welcome Allen Canaday, formerly the Planning and Scheduling Manager from the North American Maintenance Excellence Award wining Mount Holly Aluminum Smelter. Allen will be sharing his hard earned reliability knowledge with the students of Eruditio and The Institute at Patriots Point and with all our blog readers with his guest post. Welcome Allen!

  "Did you know many of today’s manufacturing companies are experiencing unprecedented pressures on a positive bottom-line performance?  This is especially true for U.S. based commodity businesses.  Many of these businesses succumb to the thought process of costs cutting their way to prosperity and all too often the repair and maintenance budget becomes the target for reductions.  Such action may provide short-term costs benefits but will never be sustainable.  Eventually, we, the Maintenance & Reliability professionals, must teach businesses to adopt a new approach to this old problem.  As practitioners we must drive continuous improvement, not only in our processes, but in our leadership development for supervisors, advanced skills training for the crafts, reliability engineers and maintenance planners and schedulers.  Building effective, sustainable processes and passionately managing these processes to the smallest detail will deliver sustainable results to the bottom line through improved asset availability."

Understanding Asset Related Criticality: Managing asset by criticality (Part 3)

 Darrin Wikoff shares the final installment in his three part series on Asset Criticality.

MANAGING ASSETS BY CRITICALITY

Once we understand the meaning behind the number, the criticality analysis model becomes a tool used to develop the asset management plans.  For those assets that are within the top 20%, reliability specialists will typically proceed with a Failure Modes Effects Analysis (FMEA) to assess the risk priority associated with each type of failure, and to determine the appropriate corrective actions.  But we again must consider the critical characteristics that are common throughout the organization, across all assets, critical or not.  In doing so, asset management becomes a plant wide process.  If “Mission Impact” is commonly critical, than Engineering may need to considered equipment redundancy plans.  For those organizations that find “Spares Lead Time” particularly critical, a Materials Management improvement program should be initiated.  Those organizations that struggle to manage the cost of “Corrective Maintenance History”, Maintenance should evaluate existing preventive maintenance effectiveness or examine the methods by which work is executed.
When managing asset-related risks, we only have a few fundamental decisions we can make, control it, eliminate it, or accept the risk. Understanding how non-conformances impact your organization’s ability to meet strategic objectives is the first step towards establishing an economical asset management system. To learn more about Asset Criticality Analysis or Asset Management Planning, please contact me at DWikoff@eruditiollc.com or visit us at www.eruditiollc.com.

Understanding Asset Related Risk: Part 2 What can be learned from the number?

Darrin Wikoff shares the second post in the series on criticality.
WHAT CAN BE LEARNED FROM THE NUMBER?
This is the point where most asset management processes go wrong.  Many models in use today will set a criticality ranking based solely on the scoring range.  For example, an asset which scores between 75 and 100 may be considered “critical”, while an asset that scores less than 25 may be “expendable”.  This practice undermines the entire concept of criticality analysis.  The organization might as well give each asset a number from 1 to 5 and call all things equal.  This grouping of scores provides no meaningful data for establishing or revising asset management plans, nor does it delineate between “critical” assets to illustrate which assets are regulatory controlled, mission critical, or simply unreliable.
We need to recognize that all assets are not created equal.  We also need to remember that the model we are trying to implement is an “analysis”, which by definition means to scrutinize or examine the data collected to gain knowledge for the purpose of making intelligent, data-driven decisions.  The results of our analysis should not only identify those assets that are within the top 20%, but should also indicate the leading characteristic that makes each asset critical.
Using the Table 1 example, we might conclude that the “No. 12 Cooling Water Pump” is a critical asset as it falls within the top 20% guidelines, but the score of ‘80’ alone tells us nothing about how to manage this “critical” asset.  Because we categorized the risk attributes, we are able to quickly identify that by reducing the consequences associated with a single-point-failure, through Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED), ready service spares, or properly managed critical spares inventory, we can lower the criticality ranking, allowing Maintenance and Operations to focus their efforts on the truly unreliable, unpredictable assets.
The last post next week will talk about "managing assets by criticality"

5 Questions for Making Financial Decisions within a Project

Guest Post: Making Financial Decisions within a Project is an exert from Darrin Wikoff book Centered on Excellence Return on Assets (ROA) is the indicator that supports the decision making process to determine which locations will receive capital investment from the Corporation, or additional market share as a result of their demonstrated efficiency. ROA is a very dynamic metric and works like a pendulum swinging from a fixed point based on fluctuations in net income or net assets. The idea is to create a balance by increasing revenue to offset the cost of consuming fixed assets (operating and maintaining), or reducing costs to improve margins per unit produced while reducing your net asset value through depreciation. When developing your Financial Strategy you need to ask yourself a few questions:

• At what point will capital improvements impact my ability to maintain costs at an economical level?
• At what point do my current costs overcome my ability to depreciate assets effectively?
• At what point is it no longer economical to maintain existing plant assets, therefore causing me to invest capital? 
• How much additional production volume is required to offset the impact of capital investment, assuming that the cost of maintaining these assets will remain constant or certainly not increase above current cost ratios? 
• At what point does market value impede my ability to offset costs and eliminate the possibility of capital investment as a viable solution?

 Two fundamentally bad financial models are those that focus narrowly on “cost cutting to prosperity” or “buying your way to success”. Neither of these strategies will sustain long-term benefits for your company.

Critical Factors to Determining Criticality of Your Asset Base

Today, thanks to a conversation I was having yesterday with a client here in the United Kingdom, I thought I would pontificate on the science of criticality. Here are three quick points to think about when you are setting up your equipment criticality process.
First ABC or 123 is not enough.
The idea for criticality is that you are listing your assets in order of importance to your business goals. The more granularity you provide then the easier it becomes to use the list for things like:
Planning, sequencing, and scheduling (order of job plan development and level of plan detail etc.)
Materials stocking and spares (critical equipment may have critical parts or spares)
Equipment maintenance plan development (level of detail and techniques applied)
If all of your assets are in three or five "buckets" of criticality you can run into issues. For example lets say you have 1000 assets and five levels of criticality, but in the mind of your facility staff you have a process driven plant with assets in series so almost nothing is unimportant. Because of this, your team scores few low criticality assets in the 1 (lowest) criticality. Now you have say 970 assets in four levels of criticality with most of them on the upper end but you reserved the highest level for safety or environmental assets. Now you have 920 assets spread across 3 levels. Even if they are spread evenly you will have 30 percent of your assets in each category. This is just not good enough to facilitate good business decisions. So what can you do? Try at least a 100 level criticality and better case is that you use a 1000 point scale. The idea is to get the assets spread apart across the range so that when you use criticality in decision making it does not give you buckets of assets but instead just a few assets at each level.
The second thought is that your criticality criterial must disperse the assets out across the range. You should have at least 10 criteria. They should include things like:
Redundancy
Spare parts availability
Historical reliability
Importance to the process
Safety, health, and environmental effect
And others.
Third, this was an interesting though provided by the client who was studying their spare parts supply chain, you should take the spare part availability to the next level and think about supply chain risk. As many countries close down and off shore the manufacture of spare parts and equipment your risk can go up.  For example ten years ago here in England if you needed a spare part for a mill there might be three suppliers here in country that could manufacture and provide that part with in a few weeks maximum. Now it is only made and stocked in India or Japan and the local manufactures are gone. Think about the earthquakes and tsunamis that have effected Japan and the wars that have effected other supplier regions. This puts the facility at risk raising the criticality of that asset because if it breaks and the only spares are in an unstable part of the world. It could be months or even years before that part is available. Because of this risk we may want a factor to raise criticality to the point that critical spares are kept onsite for this machine.
So there are three things to think about as you ponder the set up of your criticality process. I'm sure you will think of others.

Facts and Statistics on Growth, Skills, Reliability, and Manufacturing

Today's blog post includes many facts and statistics that I have collected while preparing to present at the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufactures Reliability Conference this week. This is the group formally known as NPRA and if you are going to be their look me up. These tidbits are from various recent magazine articles and studies and will help you communicate the need for both education and retention of talent in your facility.

According the Group Outlook Survey and and an article in Plant Engineering mid size manufactures are seeing the following:

• 68% of respondents expect revenue to increase in 2013
• 87% of companies expect capital expenditures to grow or remain constant and 39% expect to spend more than 2012
• 43% plan to hire more employees in 2013 versus 24% in 2010 with 52% maintaining current employment levels this is up from the last few year
• 68% expect increased sales in 2013 over strong sales in 2012
• 61% are attributing this to new products for 2013
•  70% have increased material and services purchases from American suppliers with Mexico following second as an effect of near-shoring 

What does all this mean? Manufacturing is growing. They are hiring. They are buying new equipment. They are buying more raw materials here in the US. That effects most of us.
Questions: Are they building reliability into the new assets? Are these new hires ready to operate and maintain equipment at a level that can facilitate the increased output that is required? With this growth in the market and the 401k investment value now returning to per-recession levels will we see baby-boomers retire in mass?

According to a 2011 ARC Advisory Group report:

• The average impact of unplanned downtime in process industries is $20 billion or 5% of production
• With every 10 workers retiring only 5 will take their place

 What does this tell us? We will continue to have to do the same or more with less people so automation will grow and efficiency through skills and application will be more important.
Questions: Do we have the skills? Are we spending on training to create the skills to operate, maintain and troubleshoot automation and increasing equipment complexity?

According to Fractional Research Inc. a company that does distillation research for chemical and engineering companies:

• An estimated 10,000 workers a day are leaving the work force for the next 20 years
• That's 400,000 years of experience leaving each day

What does this tell us? We can't wait. The time is now. We have to collect the historical knowledge via our Maintenance Planners through the job plan library, Reliability Engineers through FMEAs and through our Process Engineers by incorporating existing knowledge into our automation system logic.
Questions: Are you collecting experience?

According to a 2012 report by the Construction Labor Market Analyzer (CLMA):

• Demand in the south eastern U.S. for skilled workers is expected to average 2.3 million during the 2012 to 2017 time period
• That is 3.4 million skilled crafts needed in North and South Carolina alone through January 2016
• Prior to 2008 it was estimated that 20 percent of current work force would retire. This was slowed by the recession but now it is happening during the recovery further hampering supply of skilled trades when we need them most.

These skilled trade represent a drain of trades from manufacturing and capital improvement and shows a systemic issue with the trades in general.
Questions? What are you doing to retain and up-skill your trades?  Will you have what you need to meet the sales growth and increased volume we mentioned above?

Chemical Processing's Annual Salary Survey of Engineers shared the following tidbits:

• The average raise is 4.27% which is up from 4.15% last year
• Bonuses also increased from $6,318 to $6,483 this year
• 39% mentioned lack of recognition as the main driver for job discontent.
• 68% mentioned challenge and stimulation of the job as one of their top satisfaction drivers
• 58% mentioned Salary and Benefits as one of their top satisfaction drivers

ChemicalProcessing.com recently ask their readers "How will the retirement of 'baby boomers' affect your site over the next 5 years?"

• 46% of respondents expect a significant impact and 37% expect to be effected somewhat. 

What does this mean to us?
With companies offering a 10% increase in compensation over the current level as a new hire, engineers are entertaining offers of employment elsewhere. Others are retiring. You could be loosing talent and experience.
Questions:
What are you doing to retain your engineering talent? Are you providing recognition? Are you increasing wages to match the industry?

The "Perfect Storm?"
With the need for skilled trades and skilled engineers in manufacturing increasing due to demand driven by economic recovery and capital expansion battling with the departure of the "baby boomers" of both disciplines with the return of the value of the 401K retirement plans, we could be set for a "Perfect Storm." That storm is a skills shortage not a people shortage. To compound the situation many companies underspent on maintenance during the recession creating assets that are unreliable and running with the defects of not being properly cared for. Now we are asking those same assets to produce more and run harder and those induced defects are coming to light. Do you have the skills to fix them?
What are you doing to keep the skilled, collect their knowledge, and equip the future employees for your success?
Will the loss of skills and knowledge take with it your reliability and in turn your ability to meet market demand?

Processes and Technology Not Processes or Technology

Many of us in the reliability world love to implement new technology in our plants. It might be a condition monitoring tool or a new piece of software like a EAM or CMMS. Today I wanted to share with you a study and graphic that shows the return on investment of both technology and process as well as the two together. In the beginning you start in the red box and you implement new toys and technology and you end up in the yellow box with a negative 7 percent return on investment from your new tools in old processes. So what if we went after better business processes first. By re-engineering our business processes and removing the waste we are able to generate a 27 percent return on investment and arrive in the blue box. Not a bad return but, if we combined our new processes with our new technology we are able to get a return on investment that is very respectable 75 percent and land in the orange square. It is the "synergy of and" versus the "tyranny of or." In the end for the most success we need both in our strategies. You need the processes to start the improvements and then the tools to support the processes for efficiency.

Confucius say: Planning and Scheduling Cause Confusion

The topic of planning and scheduling and what each one means has been a big discussion point here in China this week. The Chinese appear to have only one word that means both planning and scheduling but in reality everywhere I teach from Europe to the Middle East and all across the Americas there is confusion  on the difference so today I thought I would share planning and then scheduling as the topic of the week.



Planning is the creation of the work package including:
Job plan and steps and durations
Parts required
Special tools required
Permits required
Personal protective equipment required
Crafts or personnel types required
Etc.
Scheduling is assigning the jobs to a time slot on a schedule.

The reason that this is important is that many of us measure percentage planned work for bench marking purposes and in more cases than not this number is actual the percent poorly scheduled because when you dive in you find that the jobs do not contain the planning elements mentioned above.
Many sites pursue ninety percent planned and scheduled work as a bench mark but you have only reached that number if you have at least the basic elements of a job plan for each job.
One example that I see often would be a work order that says only "remove and replace hot oil pump Time required 8 hours" this is not a plan at best it is a work request that has been scheduled without planning. It does not break down the task or suggest what parts will be needed or what permits might be required. While some might argue that all work is planned and that it is just the level of planning that is in questions I think you can see that it does not meet the intent of the metric and does not provide for the results we are trying to achieve. 

Thanksgiving Leftovers and Lower Cost Reliability

What if after the Thanksgiving feast you just stuck the leftover food in your china cabinet until the next time you wanted them. This sounds crazy yet many times after plant outages when kitted work is completed the left overs are crammed into a tool box or under a desk in an office. A tool box is no more a suitable storage place for left over parts than a china cabinet is for left over turkey and potato salad. When you are done with the turkey it goes into the refrigerator and when you have leftover parts they should be returned to the maintenance store room where their quality can be verified and they can be preserved in a controlled environment. 

The questions are:

Do you have a "parts return to stores" process?

Does it make returns easy to prevent "squirreling" of parts on the shop floor?

Does it insure quality parts are kept in stores and damaged parts are disposed of?

In the end we want to prevent spoilage and insure that the part and the turkey provides maximum health and reliability and not infant mortality. This way of thinking will get us a lower cost level of reliability now.

Force versus Finesse

Forcing Misalignment

This weekend I was watching my daughter assemble a toy robot. She is young and does not yet understand the concept of finesse. She is more of the brute force school of assembly. In her mind, if it doesn't go together then what you need to do is push harder. If you need to escalate beyond that then bang it on something. If that doesn't work then it is obviously broken and therefor can't be assembled. You can see her in the photo misaligned and still pushing harder.

Alignment Finesse

As I watched this I realized she is not the only one who does this on a regular basis. Many times we get a process or method in our mind and we skip the finesse and go strait for brute force. In our world it may look a bit different but it could sounds like this: "Boss says I have got to get this new process rolled out... I told our folks to just follow the new process... They didn't follow the process so I am going yell and scream about following the process... If that doesn't work then I will let them know that they are just not going to work out and I will look for someone who will follow the process." OK maybe a bit simplified and exaggerated but my money is on it not being that far off.

The real problem may be that the method being installed or implemented does not fit the application or the process is too different culturally for folks to grasp. Digging deeper we find that we did not take the time to look at the situation and understand all of the moving parts and how they work together. It could be that we missed an emotional, political, or rational issue with the change and until we look at each of these areas and address any underlying cause then adoption may escape us.
If you are in that situation take a look at the three areas shown to the above left. Think about what could go wrong in each of the dimensions and how you can proactively address that area using finesse in the place of sheer force.

Are Your Reliability Efforts Haunted by the Lack of an Effective Plan?

So many facilities struggle with timely results and expected return on investments within their reliability improvement efforts. One of the demons that continuously shows it's face is the sequencing within the improvement plan.
Sites tend to want to pursue the exciting and fun things and forget many of the foundational elements that support the shiny stuff.  For example a site will purchase technology in the form of software or predictive tools before developing work flow process. Without understanding the work management process you don't have the data needed for the software to analyze nor the ability to execute the work identified with the predictive tools. This just leads to the exciting new tools being underutilized and then eventually put on a shelf to gather dust.
When you are looking at your initiative and planning your strategy, take a look at what is required to support the pieces that you desire. Be honest about your maturity in these support elements and build your base before your tower. Towers are great to look at and show others but foundations are where a smart man spends his time.
Some of the common issues I see include:

1. Scheduling work without planning first. How can you have an accurate schedule when you have not had a planner break down the job into small enough parts to accurately estimate time required?
2. Predictive tools applied without work process to execute the findings prior to point F on the P-F curve.
3. Software such as EAM and CMMS without standard work process to make them work.
4. Software for engineering analysis without data from FRACAS or failure coding to input for analysis. 
5. Initiatives like lean and six sigma applied before with maintenance induced variation and waste is reduced. 
6. Reliability engineering tools applied before maintenance engineering tools. When you have a pure reliability engineer working on the future in a fully reactive facility it becomes a lot like rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. You need the maintenance engineer to introduce procedures, precision maintenance and failure mode based maintenance to stop the the sinking and then we can focus on the next cruise. 

If you want to keep the gremlins out of your improvement strategy then focus on the processes first then apply the tools, software and shiny stuff.

You Don't Need an Asset Manager!?!

This week I am attending the Global Forum on Maintenance and Asset Management (GFMAM) executive meeting in Rio de Janerio Brazil. We are talking about things like the reliability, Asset Management Landscape and the upcoming ISO 55000 standard. One point that has been discussed quite a lot is the concept of an Asset Manager. In the US we are seeing companies and individuals "upscale" their titles from maintenance to reliability to life cycle management and now asset management. The sometimes missed point is that each of these is substantially different from the one before. You could argue that maintenance is a subset of reliability and reliability is a subset of asset management but even if you don't agree with that I would suggest that you might agree the scope of asset management is none the less very broad. If you would like to see GFMAM's asset management landscape which outlines the many elements click on the link above. So based on the breadth of the topic of asset management many of us have come to the conclusion that one person can not acquire the necessary level of knowledge to adequately manage the full scope and will not have the necessary time and focus.
My current understanding affords me the opinion that the best solution is an asset management core team. This team would be made up of an engineering manager, maintenance manager, operations manager, and a financial manager working together. If we use this structure we can cover all of the topics of the asset management landscape with an individual who has the understanding of the core concepts of asset management but also has the specific knowledge of the topics in their area of focus and function.  On the other hand if your organization goes with the stand alone asset manager, by the global definition, the individual will be overwhelmed and could find themselves in conflict with the other managers. By the nature of the job description the AM will play in the other manager's sandbox and at the least create a perception of minimizing their power and influence. 
What are your thoughts? Have you seen the asset management landscape? Do you have an operations or maintenance manager that reports to asset manager?

Five Ways to Improve Plant Reliability with the Internet

Many of us are becoming more and more dependent on the internet to manage many parts of our lives, however some of our reliability peers and brethren still have not embraced the power of the web. So, I though I would share 5 great places to start improving your reliability with Al Gore's incredible invention, the Internet.
 
Five things reliability folks should use on the internet:

#1 Google 
Google is the most obvious tool but also the most powerful, it can provide access to any one of the following:
Vendor websites   
Old pdf vendors manuals and sales literature with specifications 
Common problem with equipment in the form of articles from publications, blogs, bulletin boards, and historical sites
Spare parts for obsolete equipment
Special tools
New technologies
The key here is to search different combinations of words because not everyone calls a piece of equipment or technology by the same name. You know, it is the old grease zerk, fitting, nipple issue that has plagued CMMS users for years. 
I will be facilitating a root cause analysis tomorrow and the first step in that process for me is to google the equipment manufacture as well as the product and a list of common failures of that equipment. Sometimes I am amazed by what is already out there on the web that I can use not to prejudge the root cause but to improve my understanding of anything from design operating context to expectations for maintenance and known weak design points.
#2 Wikipedia
Wikipedia is my go to site for information about companies, product, equipment, industries, and concepts. You can click on each linked word above to see an actual example.
Say you are curious about Monte Carlo Simulations (if you are just click), quickly you can see a definition, details, and many times even examples of how to use the tool. The one point to remember is that it is all crowd sourced, meaning that the "facts" come from many people and are reviewed regularly but it can still have some inaccuracies.
#3 LinkedIn
LinkedIn is where you can connect with many different people from your and other industries. It is a networking site for professionals and a great place to get answers to questions from others in similar situations. On LinkedIn I find both the Groups and Answers section extremely useful. Groups is where you can find a congregation of folks who are interested in the same topic, or company, or discipline and you join them in this interest. You can pose questions to the members of the group or just read their post and learn from their questions and thoughts. The Answers section, which you can find under the more button in the header menu, is a great place to go to ask a question of a larger audience. Your questions can be sent out to more than just a group, it can be sent out to everyone who has interest in the topic you select. This can be thousands of people. You can also address the question just to your network of connections depending on what your needs are. If you send it out to everyone on a topic then you will be amazed how quickly people will respond with great answers and along the way you may make some great new connections.
#4 Ebay
While everyone knows you can buy clothes or toys or cameras or cars most people do not realize you can buy industrial equipment and parts. I find myself sometime searching specifically for obsolete items to keep an old unit running late in its product life cycle. Here is a link to the business section where you will see list of item that you may have been looking for for quite some time. You may find the one switch you need to keep that one original widget machine running that you can not get the capital to replace.
#5 Twitter
Twitter, while clogged with reports or 'tweets" of lunch locations/meal details and celebrity death hoaxes, can be a great place to see what is new in your industry or maintenance and reliability in general. The key here is to follow only those people with similar interest and then you will see when they share information, a quote, a blog post or a relevant news story. This is one of the best ways to see what is new and find new content to use in your reliability toolbox talks from a past week's blog. I constantly see new articles that I can use with clients and with our internal folks as well. Also by following or setting up searches for the hashtags for conferences you get a great look at the content that all of the presenters are sharing real time even if you cant be there.

What sites would you add? What site has been a lifesaver for you?

Tool Box Talks: Not Just For Safety Anymore

Many companies have made great improvement in the area of safety in the last ten years but some have begun to plateau. They are looking for that little push to get to the next level.We know based on data that was released by Ron Moore in his book "Making Common Sense Common Practice" that safety has a strong correlation with reliability. So I would suggest that if you want to break through to a new level of safety performance then focus on your organization's reliability.

How? Treat reliability just like we have safety. Make it everyone's responsibility. Keep it in front of the organization.
Many of us already have a morning tool box meeting where we stand around the tool box and talk about the jobs and the safety aspects of the days work. If you add reliability topics to this discussion as well then this is one way you can  keep the topic in the forefront of everyone's mind. It does not need to be a lecture as we are looking for a short five minute topic. Now this alone will not step change your reliability performance but as part of a balanced diet of other improvement task it can begin to turn the tides on reliability and on safety.
So what does it look like? I have seen it done many ways. In some cases the supervisor covers a topic from a single point lesson or other communication tool or a member of the team researches and covers a topic with the group. Getting a team member involved is great because the individual learns through their research and through teaching while providing the information for others to learn from.
What should we talk about?
I have seen topics that covered task like how to operate the bearing heater for precision installs, or how to choose the correct bolt grade or Loctite type. But I have also seen quick job plan reviews and root cause analysis report outs. As you rotate through you will want to focus on why each topic is important to the individual and the overall improvement effort. The key is to, like safety, keep the organization focused on the goal and the prize.

What topics would you cover?
What other ideas have you used to keep reliability in the organizations eye?

Question from the Field: Maintenance Ready Backlog

So what is maintenance ready backlog, and why do I need 2-4 weeks of it?

Maintenance ready backlog represents the work orders that have progressed through your maintenance business process to the point that they have been approved and are planned for execution. These jobs have all of the parts, tools, and work procedures packaged and completely ready.  When we say you need two to four weeks that means that you should have enough work in this stage so that if your crafts had no break-ins or emergencies to do then you could keep them all fully employed for two to four weeks.
You need this amount for a few reasons:
First you want to be able to use these "ready to work" jobs to build your schedule each week. You need at least two weeks selection for operations and maintenance to choose from to be able to create a fully planned schedule that takes into account available equipment downtime and manpower. Your goal is to keep unplanned jobs and jobs without the parts on hand off of the schedule. By doing this you will lower maintenance cost and minimize schedule breaks. If you get below the two week mark you will start to see that you just do not have enough work orders to adequately utilize all of your crafts or the available scheduled downtime and many site are then tempted to pull in unplanned jobs and try to rush the parts and the planning.
Second, You don't need to exceed four weeks because you do not want to have excess inventory and tools tied up in the ready backlog.
To manage this level there needs to be constant communication between the Maintenance Manager, who controls the amount of craft hour available for work completion, and the Planner/Scheduler. If the Maintenance Manager were to approve extra hours of overtime for a few weeks then that will consume the ready backlog at an accelerated pace. The planner would then have to step up the production of job packages or face the possibility that they could run out of ready backlog and have to work on unplanned work.
If you can maintain the level in the band you will find that it allows for a much more effective and effective overall maintenance process. This equals lower maintenance cost for the same or higher levels of reliability.