Laser Focused Turbo Implementation: Throwing the BS flag again

We live in a world where we are constantly sold silver bullets, magic pills, and laser focused turbo implementations. When in reality it takes focus, time, knowledge, and grit to implement organizational change. If someone promises you instant implementation, throw the BS flag. (If you don't have one let us know, we have plenty.) Real change takes more than a few weeks; no matter how many consultants you throw at it. Let's take a look at a traditional manufacturing reliability improvement initiative in each of these four areas.
First Focus: You need a vision to focus on and a plan to get you there. Chances are it will not be laser focused because reliability is a broad topic with may interdependent elements. For example, predictive maintenance without work processes is a fool's errand. 
Second Time:You need the time to train on the concepts and soak then train and soak again. You need the time to communicate the vision, focus, and the plan and then time for that to soak. You have to give the site the time to digest what is wrong with their current process before you can ask them to change to a new process. It all takes time. If anyone says they can generate meaningful organizational change in less than 6 months grab a flag.
Third Knowledge: Knowledge and "know how" speeds up the change process. You want to find it, consume it, and share it quickly. But even with a library of knowledge you need time to help the organization to absorb it and the others to put it to use.
Fourth Grit: Grit is the desire and fortitude to get things done even when it is hard. Organization change is hard. Really hard. Few are successful and a big reason is grit and gumption. If you have a vision, knowledge, and time but you don't have grit you will fail. It is that simple.
So in the end, don't look for silver bullets they are like seven day diets and 5 minute work outs, someone ends up fat and someone else ends up happy. If you are promised a quick fix or a turbo implementation throw that flag because you know that what is worth doing is worth doing right.

Are Your Business Processes Traffic Bottlenecks?

First up sorry about the blog unreliability recently. We are back after a short break and focused on helping you with your pursuit of reliability.
So this week I was caught in traffic and that got me thinking about processes. Processes are like the roads we follow. In the picture you see many people following the process. Unfortunately it has a bottleneck ahead. Now what if I decided to leave the road and drive into the grass? I could move much faster there outside of the normal process right? The problem occurs when everyone decides to leave the process. Now, we are all out in the grass going different ways and causing damage and congestion.
This is what happens in many facilities. They build great processes through their lean implementation or EAM or ERP roll out but over time things change and it becomes easier to work off process through a work around than it is to follow the outdated process with all of their bottlenecks. This is not catastrophic at first because only a few power users are running off in the grass but over time more and more people tire of the bottlenecks and create their own path. Then data and people start colliding and the system starts to struggle because it is not being used the way it was designed. After a period of time you are left with carnage and debris and truly broken processes. Inefficiency takes over and waste piles up everywhere. 
So how do we avoid it? I like to do a yearly process review and improvement event. It starts by printing out all of your processes on large format paper and posting them on the wall. I then get multidisciplinary groups of users to come in and we go through the processes box by box or step by step. We are looking for changes that have occurred or should occur, "work arounds" that have been instituted and broken connections from one process to another. I reward honesty during this process and we note what we like and what is not getting us where we want to be. We study the "work arounds" and see if they should become the revisions to the process. An added benefit of the exercise is that we are reviewing and reminding the groups of what we have said we will do and they are adding details that increase their ownership of the processes. After this exercise, compliance goes up and efficiency follows as well.
Are you doing yearly process improvement events as part of your continuous improvement plan? 

Are You a Reliability Champion or Reliability Killer?

As I travel from plant to plant and facility to facility I see both Reliability Champions and Reliability Killers.
First, lets talk about the "bad guys." These are the people in the organization that are not necessarily against getting better but they do not "have the time" to make the improvements and certainly do not want to wait for others to either. These folks are quick to say "When is the asset going to be back up?" without asking "what caused the problem?" and "How do we prevent it from happening again?" These are the ones who will spend the companies money to buy predictive and precision maintenance tools but because of the learning curve, do not allow them to be used lest they slow down the repair process. Their goal is not to fix it right just to fix it again and preferably as fast as possible. During one extended visit to a site I watched the company spend a substantial amount of money on alignment equipment and training but as soon as the crafts tried to use them and took a few extra minutes the supervisor yelled at them "to get that stuff off there and use a strait edge. We have to get this line up!" He was a Reliability Killer.
So what does a Reliability Champion look like? They are still concerned with getting the equipment fixed but they allow that bit of extra time that can get us to root cause and improve the precision of the repair. They use your target business processes. They know if we take a little down time now then I prevent a lot of downtime in the future. Their definition of fixed is a permanent repair not one requiring baling wire, duct tape and a hammer. They like to fix it once and forget it (after it is recorded in the CMMS).
In the end the reliability killer can be neutralized and in some cases even converted to a champion. It starts with communication and the creation of awareness and then as the killer sees the error of his ways and why changing could benifit him then he can accept more knowledge that can used to correct the situation or at least stop the killing. It is not eazy but it is possible with a plan and the desire to communicate.
So which category do your leaders fit into? Are you the Champs or the Killers? What are your plans to change that?

Walk down: It's Not Just Exercise Any More

Do you know how many assets you have to maintain? Do you know what equipment types they are? If you need a part do you know enough about the equipment to place the order without a trip to see it? Do you have a perfect General Ledger that does not list assets that no longer exist?
If you answered no to any of these questions then you may need to go on a walk down.
Walk down is the process step that starts the path toward more reliable assets. During the walk down you collect things like equipment name plate data, equipment type, components, configuration, parts, as well as other details required for a good maintenance plan.
The data collected during the walk down will be used to build things like:
The hierarchy of equipment
The predictive maintenance database
The Bill of Materials or BOM for each asset It will facilitate discussions during the equipment criticality step of the process. Specifically when we dive into the question of redundancies and use. It will also be used by planners when they plan and accountants when the account for the assets on the books.
With all of these uses it becomes clear that  it is worth the effort to collect equipment data. So how do we get started? The way I see it you have two options. The first and undoubtably the best is to dedicate teams to each area of he facility and provide them with a walk down tool or database to collect the data. If you use this methodology you get better results faster than the alternative, however it comes at a cost. But hey like they always say, there is good, fast and cheap but you can only pick two. The second option is to collect as you go with a data collection form assigned to each work order the first time it is issued against the system of assets in an area. The form is completed and collected for entry into the CMMS and other databases. In this approach you spread out and some what lower the cost but at the the sake of speed. In most organizations time is money and unreliability never takes a break so in the end the best way is to dedicate resources and build quickly and then update future field changes with the form. If you have questions about databases or how long it should take a team to collect the data then shoot me an email or give me a call and we can discuss you facility and our past experiences.
Are you happy with your criticality or do you need to go for a walk?

Is Criticality Critical? Question Answered.

I was completing a reliability assessment of a manufacturing facility this week and this question came up: Is criticality really worth the effort it takes to do it right?
We can talk about what good criticality looks like in a future post but today lets talk about all of the things asset criticality is used for.
Good asset criticality with a nice asset distribution is used to:
Remove the emotion from the work approval process by prioritizing the work off of business need.
Determine the level of planning required for the job.
Determine the level of equipment maintenance plan (EMP) the asset requires to meet the business need.
Determine need for reliability centered maintenance (RCM) to identify failure modes.
Can help to identify what areas of the facility that are critical to the process or business and may require adjustments in maintenance or operations staffing.
Determine materials stocking requirements from a spare parts standpoint. In general, critical equipment will have more critical parts.
Determine root cause analysis need as a part of the triggers contained in the RCA process.
I am sure there are other place that we use criticality but I just wanted to show why this is so important and why it is worth the time it takes to complete your criticality the right way.

What Are Your Three Reliability Resolutions?

Reliability Resolution Wrecker

Yes it is that time of the year... resolution season. Everyone is planning to lose weight, get in shape, learn a new instrument, lower their stress levels, spend more time with the family, play more and harder or some other life change. If you live your life in a operations, maintenance, and reliability role the one thing you need is more time to make these resolutions possible. The problem is that many of us can not go to the gym or spend more time with the family when your reactive facility requires your constant attention. I have lived in that reactive world. The plant controlled my life instead of the leadership controlling the plant. I think the plant gremlins went into overdrive around the holidays. the facility tended to break down on holidays and important weekends and required a trip into the plant to sort it out. So thinking back what resolutions would I have most liked to make the plant's "Reliability Resolutions?" Here they are:
1. We were good outage planners and executioners but we needed to rely less on preventative maintenance outage work and more on the predictive tools. We needed to stop the invasive downtime requiring inspections and incorporate and trust the predictive tools to provide surgical precision with in our outages. This would have shorten outages and decreased infant mortality.
2. We needed a resolution to make precision maintenance our new standard. We needed to provide the training and the reinforcement structure to drive proper alignment, balancing, torquing and lubrication.
3. We had an ageing workforce so our third resolution should have been one aimed at capturing their knowledge within the EAM or CMMS. There was a lot of equipment history with in the heads of the "mature"crafts. If we could gather this data and add it to the precision maintenance mentality resolution we could make a step change in the infant mortality rates and reoccurring failures.
So these are my three "Reliability Resolutions." With these resolutions we could have begun the process of retaking the facility and controlling it instead of letting the equipment be the boss. If we kept our focus then in no time we would have had the free time to focus on our personal resolutions again. What would your three "Reliability Resolutions" be? If you don't mind sharing then please post them below.
Happy New Year!

Wrapping Up The Year In Reliability With A Challenge

2012 has been a very interesting year. We have seen increased national focus on manufacturing and some additional focus on engineering as well. We have seen some industries began to gain strength and production demand while others are not so patiently waiting for their own increase.
From an asset management standpoint, efforts continue to increase as the new ISO 55000 standards gets closer to reality. You should see more and more discussion on this topic in the new year. I will feature some here at ReliabilityNow.com
In general reliability improvement efforts seem to be stable and possibly showing the beginnings of increased focus for next year. Many industries are hesitant to dive in until the beginning of the year when "things will be clearer." If you are trying to get your organization to move forward you may hear many excuses for the delay but they tend to fall into two categories. Below I have listed the two and a few simple thoughts on how best to help each group pull the trigger on reliability.
Group 1. We are too busy to take on reliability at the moment...
Goal you create: More uptime through reliability
For these folks I would suggest that you might want to help them to see all of the production losses they are facing and showing them how to support the reliability improvements efforts without affecting current production demands. One way to do this is through a reduction in non value added activities and the associated downtime. One example would be having a small group eliminate non value adding preventive maintenance task. This effort will increase uptime of the equipment by reducing the downtime required for PM activities and free up resources to work on other improvement task by reducing the maintenance work load. The site might use the freed up labor to work with planners and improve job plans and incorporate precision maintenance. This would eliminate more maintenance downtime and build the improvements. By the end of the year these sites should be making more product and more profit because of their reliability improvements. 
Challenge: This group may try to delay the improvement for tomorrow because they are just too busy making the production for today. You have to break that cycle by creating a burning platform and a reason for change.
Group 2. We are not busy enough to take on reliability at the moment...
Goal you create: Lower manufacturing cost through reliability
Interestingly, the tactics here are similar to the previous group in that we want to reduce non value added task but the goal is completely different. This time we don't always want more production since the demand is low but we want to produce what we need at the lowest cost possible. This can be the perfect time to attack long standing reliability issues because the work can be done at a much lower cost by planning it out and scheduling it using the down time provided by lower demand. Since production downtime cost is the biggest part of the spend for many improvements this makes it easier to do during a slowdown. Now we need to free up money and labor to pay for the reliability improvements and one way that we can do that is through refining your equipment maintenance plans to remove unnecessary part expense and labor cost. The quickest way can be a combination of RCM and PM review and RCA done to prevent failures, stop re-occurrence and remove any item that does not address a known and likely failure mode. By reducing activity for activities sake you reduce material cost and contractor cost while also reducing infant mortality.
Challenge: In this group the fear of failure is high due to economic pressures and this fear can stop the organization from being able to make the changes that lead to the improvements. Master the elements of change management to ease the transition.
Now there are many other ways to go about addressing both of these situations but they are both situation specific and a function of the sites maturity. You may even find that both of these situations exist in your site.  Feel free to reach out and we can discuss your specific details and craft a plan directed at your needs.

I wish you a great year of reliability in 2013 and I challenge you to attack unreliability in 2013 where it lives, in the minds of your organization. Create Desire, Educate, Apply, Sustain!

The Hunger for Reliability

So summer is here in the US and when I think of summer I think of food from the grill, cold drinks and fun on the water around the Charleston area where I live. Just this last week I was out on the boat doing a little fishing after work. As I drifted down the river enjoying the water and the cold beverages, I begin to smell the third component of summer… grilled food. Since I had the first two I progressively begin to want the last one. Soon I was obsessed with the thought of ribs, hamburgers, steaks and BBQ. Can you relate? Have you ever had the intoxicating smell of the grill call you away from your afternoon activities?

So what does this have to do with reliability? When I think about profitable manufacturing I also think of three things I enjoy: production demand, safety, reliability. With the turning of the economy many now have increased production demand. They have spent time focusing on safety and have great performance in that area. The only area they lack is reliability. We know that if we can get all three of these working together then we can enjoy a lower stress business profitability. In fact, one should expect to spend more time away from work not worrying about the day to day issues, the breakdowns, and the missed deliveries. Instead we can enjoy our version of summertime fun.

The problem is that if you have never witnessed reliability and you have spent your whole life in the reactive world then what would drive a desire for change? You become comfortable where you are. You can't imagine reliability much less have a hunger for it. To get past this you need to get a picture of it at least in your mind.

How are you communicating what it looks like to your plant and why it is so desirable? What are you doing to fan the flames and create the hunger for reliability? Below is a list of ideas that you might use to first create awareness and then demonstrate what’s in it for your people and why they should hunger for it. 

• Invite your informal leaders on plant visits to world class sites; Let them see what it is like in the less chaotic world of Reliability. Look locally and not just in your industry and you may be surprised how close world class can be.
• Share best practices through pictures, stories, case studies, and single point lessons. I like to see them incorporated in the daily tool box meeting or kick off meeting. Many samples can be found on the internet via blogs and Linked-in.
• Send individuals to conferences like the SMRP and IMC where they can talk to their peers in other organizations and bring back that excitement to the plant. Have them share what they have learned.
• Create a newsletter celebrating your internal reliability successes.
• Have guest speakers come to your site from world class plants and let them share their success but more importantly help your site understand how they can do the same.
• Invite corporate leadership to share their vision for reliability, why they care about it, and don’t be afraid to pre-coach the leaders a bit if required to ensure alignment.

Two things you can expect to hear is: “Yea, but we are different” and “That will never work here” so make sure you are ready to answer why it will after each step you take. Without answering these questions and creating this desire or hunger the transition from reactive to reliable can be a long and slow process, that is good for pulled pork but not for corporate profits.

What are you doing in your site to build the hunger for reliability? Leave a few examples for others in the comments.

Three reasons why I detest "wrench time" as a benchmarking tool.

Ranting about Reliability:
Wrench time and wrench time studies are two of the most misused, misunderstood, and painful to deal with elements of maintenance benchmarking for three reasons:

• different definitions and standards
• data that is skewed by the act of collection
• overzealous comparisons of dissimilar metrics from different locations

We all like the implications of knowing the amount of non value added work within our maintenance schedules and we would love to be able to measure and then trend the removal of non value added time. This is a good thing, but lets look at what gets in the way and one thing to help improve our results for each challenges.
The first struggle is around the definition or standard for wrench time. What is in? What is out? Is travel time part of wrench time? How much is too much? Is prework wrench time? Is trouble shooting wrench time? You need to answer these questions and more to get something standardized for your location. A good place to start is the SMRP Metric for wrench time but my guess is that you will need to add additional clarifications to make it relevant to your site.
The data is not accurate. By virtue of focusing on the data it changes the behaviors. If you tell me you are going to watch me type out this blog and count my mistypes I will by nature slow my typing and make less errors. The same thing happens when we do wrench time studies so the numbers we get will be different than actual. I suggest the use of something known as a DILO instead of typical stop watch time studies or other tool driven methods. In a DILO or Day In The Life Of you work with the craftsman to understand what gets in his way or what irritates him as he tries to complete his daily work. You are with him or her through their day learning based on their experiences. This approach is more about helping them and less about "watching and judging" them. In the end, you identify problems like missing permits, lost parts, and wrong tools and you see first had what that is costing them in time and patience without driving a wedge between parts of the organization. If you want to talk more about DILO send me an email and I will share with you tips and tricks based on my experience. 
Some days it seems that everyone thinks they should compare their wrench time numbers to everyone else. This one is common for many metrics and KPIs but as I have suggested in the past it would be best if the sites looked at their ability to improve the metric and talked about what their delta over the last quarter was as opposed to the raw number. Then they could talk about the specific actions they have taken to get that delta. The raw metric are just too different in most cases to be compared and bad decisions can be made with bad data from bad comparisons.

Now I know I did not necessarily solve anything here but I hope I have provided a few ideas that might help as you calculated and evaluate your maintenance wrench time on your quest to reliability now.

Zero Training 5S

Just recently, I saw the first example of zero training 5S. Just in case you are curious what 5S is let me hit the highlights before moving on. It is a list of five words (coincidentally they all start with "S" weird huh?) that describe the process for organizing a work space for efficiency and effectiveness by identifying and storing the items used, maintaining the area and items, and sustaining the new order.

Below are the five and since they originated in Japan I have included their five Japaneses counterparts:
Sorting (Seiri)
Stabilizing or Straightening Out (Seiton)
Sweeping or Shining (Seiso)
Standardizing (Seiketsu)
Sustaining the Practice (Shitsuke)
 Now on with the story, I was making my monthly visit to the gym (hey I have to make good use of that gym membership right?) and I noticed they had added small boxes made of masking tape on the floor next to the equipment areas. Not that different than the one shown on the left. In the box was a bottle of equipment cleaner that every sweaty patron was expected to use at the end of each workout to Shine the equipment. Now when I came into the gym no one trained me on the use of equipment sanitizer and certainly no one told me where to put it when I was done but as I looked around I noticed that every box contained a bottle and every machine looked quite clean. Now don’t get me wrong the cleaner was not a new idea in fact they had had them for years but they were always just scattered around the gym, piled in the windows and never close enough when you needed them. I would guess this lead to lower compliance to the self-cleaning policy.
It has now been a few months since they instituted the process to Standardize the storage location and the boxes are still driving the right behavior. The cleaner is there and it is used more frequently than in the past and they are now Sustaining.

What small things can you do in your site to begin to create order? The every journey begins with a few small steps.

Seven Reasons Why Your RCA is Not Getting Results

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) can be a very powerful tool for eliminating defects and increasing efficiency and profits. I have notice seven common pitfalls that prevent practitioners from getting maximum value from their RCA efforts. Below is a brief look at each of them.

1. Not digging deep enough into the problem.

This manifest itself as either getting stuck on the physical causes which leads to replacing a lot of parts and solving the symptoms but not the true problem or even worse the human cause where it becomes an exercise in blame analysis. A gentleman by the name of Deming addressed this when he said "Blame the system not the people" The system or systemic cause allows for many if not all of the human mistakes to exist. If you want to learn more about the levels of root cause then check out this post.

2. Too many root cause investigations per month because the process triggers that kick off an investigation are too low.

The triggers can be set up to work off of a certain amount of downtime or cost or lost production or safety etc. or a combination of multiple elements but they should be set up to change as you mature into RCA. If you have the triggers set too low or if you are relying on management to ask for the investigation then you could have too many RCAs investigations and reports to complete each month. It is also important not to forget that for every RCA there is multiple action items that must be assigned, completed and verified. Can your systems and resources support that if you are busy generating RCA reports every time the wind blows.

3. Too much time spent on the report and not enough time spent on the implementation and follow up.

I am sure very few of you work for company that make RCA reports as a product. My guess is your  company probably makes wigits and walumps and in the end a three pound final report does not add anything to the bottom line or any more margin on your widgets. Please remember the company is not paid by the pound of report, we are paid by the solution and the return on investment we generates.I have a one page report that I will share with you as a model for your reports if you send me an email

4. Lack of solid well understood and applicable tools and process.

 Many sites have one side of this coin or the other and it is a major distraction. One site I visited in Brazil had great processes for problem identification and prioritization but the reliability engineers were using five whys as their only tool and were really missing the returns that they could have had.  Another site had a great selection of tools to help understand the causes of the problem but their "corporate" RCA process had not been accepted and implemented. This lead to great findings and solutions but no way to ensure that they were ever implemented or if they truly solved the problem.

5. Don't ask the right question and you will miss major causal chains.

To help to mitigate this one use some thing like design and application review and follow up with change analysis to perfect your questions before you start your in-depth investigation and interviews. If you do this correctly you reduce the amount of time you will spend stopping and gather additional data during the analysis phase.

6. Findings and solutions are not verified to ensure that they effectively eliminated the original problem.

When this step is done correctly the site uses quantifiable metrics to measure the solutions that were identified and they are done at intervals that verify a sustainable long term solution.

7. Neglect to put focus on ensuring the best return on investment.

If you use the correct tools and you dig down into the problem you should be left with multiple possibilities for resolution of the problem. Once you have this identified you can evaluate the cost to implement and the effectiveness of the solution to see which action or combination of actions gives you the best overall return on the problem. In the end we change our thinking on analysis and it becomes  less about finding "root cause" and more about finding the most effective and lowest cost mitigation or elimination strategy.

After reading through these seven common causes of "root cause failure" I hope you recognized a few and can eliminate them from taking the profits out of your process.

If you have question about any of these please feel free to send me an email.

You Might Not Have a Program....

Below is a list of things Andy Page and I have seen and heard over the years that might make you laugh but should make us cry when it comes to having a solid reliability program.

If you think change management has something to do with the vending machines in the break room ...you might not have a program

If you think change management means always having a roll of quarters in your desk...you might not have a program

If your alignment standard contains the words flashlight and straight edge...you might not have a program

If your scheduling meeting usually end with the phrase “I guess we’ll just see about that”...you might not have a program

If your job plans can all fit on 1 side of 1 piece of paper...you might not have a program

If the phrases inner race and outer race remind you call your bookie...

If the phrase ball pass frequency just makes you giggle uncontrollably...

If your IR electrical program is administered by your insurance provider...

If you can name all of the machines on your oil sampling route...

If every time the 6 Sigma guys talk about the 16 Toll Gates to improvement and you wonder why they just didn’t take the back roads...

If you think precision maintenance means having a complete set of hammers with you at all times...

If you think torque wrenches are only for the boys of NASCAR...

If your balance standard involves the use of a nickel or a small glass of water...

If you measure your lubrication quantities in tubes…

If your idea of contamination control has something to do with keeping the rats out of the break room…

If you think the planner should have his own set of tools…

If you think that every mechanic should have his own key to the storeroom…

If you think a dial indicator is a new option on your son’s cell phone...

If your idea of a shim pack includes the cardboard box the pump came in ...

If your idea of a battery tester includes the use of the tip of your tongue..

If you think eddy currents are something you have to avoid at the beach...

If your most advance machine analysis tool is a screwdriver held against your ear...

If your torque standard involves Bubba and a cheater bar...

If your X-ray equipment was ordered from the back of a comic book...

If your machine base grouting procedure includes the use of bubble gum and chap stick...

If your maintenance reference library includes only two service catalogs, one handbook and yesterdays paper...

If your Root Cause Analysis process includes a step for dumpster diving...

If your required PPE includes a bubble wrap suit...

If your folks believe that TPM stands for Totally Painted Machines...

If you repair the same equipment so often you have a special cart...

If your ultra sensitive leak detection system involves an funnel held up to Eddie's ear...

If your Root Cause Analysis findings include “fire the SOB”...

If your idea of a bearing heater is a rose bud…

If your idea of proper bearing installation involves a hammer and a chisel…

If your lubrication guy still believes that more is better…

If the closest thing to RCM you have is Rapid Corrective Maintenance...

Hope you enjoyed those and if you can, take a minute and add a few that you have heard or seen at your site.