PdM is Not Precision Maintenance (Coaches Corner)

Another great Coaches Corner post from Allen Canaday:
During a recent discussion with a student he asked me why the failure rate at their facility wasn’t improving.  Over the last two years they had invested in the purchase of various PdM (Predictive Maintenance) technologies and trained personnel on their use and application.  The facility had conducted a criticality analysis and SFMECA (Simplified Failure Mode Effects and Criticality Analysis) to determine their critical failure modes.  For the most part, they had purchased and trained on the PdM technologies that would best detect the early onset of the failure modes identified in their SFMECA.  Why were assets continuing to run to failure even though failure modes are being identified? Why aren’t the PdM technologies preventing failures in our facility, he asked?
The answer in two-fold. This wasn’t the first time I fielded this question.  When I asked the student about the precision maintenance techniques utilized in their facility, he asked, “What do you mean by precision techniques”?  This was exactly the answer I was expecting! PdM technologies are diagnostic tools designed to find the early onset of failure modes, these tools don’t make the repair for you, they just help you determine what needs to be repaired.  These tools can’t tell you exactly how long you have prior to functional or catastrophic failure, the data acquired from these tools only tell you your asset has a failure mode and if no action is taken, it will eventually fail.
Precision techniques and instruments, along with the proper training on their use, increases the probability that when the repair is made, failure modes aren’t introduced into the asset resulting from the corrective work.  Precision techniques include job plans that consists of proper task-step sequences and performance standards that convey proper tolerances and measures to the technician performing the corrective work.
Next, I asked the student to explain their backlog prioritization for planned work.  Again, he asked “What do you mean by backlog prioritization”? I explained that no matter what PdM technologies you utilize, the findings must be converted to a work order to be planned and scheduled.  Even the PdM generated work orders become part of the total backlog and must be scheduled based on their severity or risk to the organization.   Poor work order prioritization practices can render your PdM efforts meaningless unless your work execution practices are robust enough to effectively prioritize work orders in your backlog.
PdM is not precision maintenance!  The two complement each other.  However, without the implementation of precision maintenance in your work execution process, expect to continue making repetitive repairs on many of your assets, even on the assets you’re utilizing PdM technologies to detect the early on-set of failure modes.

Reliability Begins with Effective Job Plans: A guest post from Coach Allen Canaday

Are you still using a job plan that doesn’t contain performance standards for proper work execution?  You know, performance standards, the technical information the job plan conveys to the technicians performing the task. This is the specific knowledge required in order to ensure the step is completed without introducing an error or failure.  I’m talking about such “trivial” information as torque specifications, belt tension, alignment tolerances and pressure settings to name a few.  Oh, you don’t need it?  You have a very experienced and talented work force who is overflowing with tribal knowledge? Why spend the time and money to research the correct performance standards?  After all, I don’t want to insult my technicians by implying their knowledge and skills are no longer adequate.  We’ve done it this way for years.
OK, so you don’t have performance standards in your job plans and don’t really see the value of taking the time to research and document them in the job plans.  Your current technicians understand what is required when they read statements such as “replace as necessary”, “adjust as needed” or “inspect for normal wear”.  You’re in great shape as long as most of them remain healthy, content, well-paid or never retire.  Have you considered these possibilities?  Oh, don’t forget about the new state-of-the-art manufacturing facility opening across town next year.  A new facility, modern equipment in an ultra-clean environment with salary ranges far beyond anything your facility can counter-offer.  Are you still confident with your tribal knowledge database?
The status quo will change, bet on it!  “Build it and they will come” was the famous quote from Field of Dreams.  There is tremendous competition in today’s marketplace for skilled technicians.  When the new facilities are built, and they will be, they will recruit the best of the best.  Some of those best will be yours!  The color of loyalty today is “green”.  If you are unable to compete in the salary and benefit arena, you will lose tribal knowledge!  How will you prepare for the “loss of knowledge” while there is still time?  In many cases this loss of tribal knowledge can be compared to your CMMS crashing and there is no back-up data. 
Invest in your job plan library without delay!  Why?  Because it’s the right thing to do.  Accurate job plans not only help capture tribal knowledge, but will force you to research many facets of your asset base that haven’t been explored.  The development of good job plans require research utilizing OEM documents and the inclusion of tried and true methods your technicians have developed over the years.  Other benefits of updating job plans include time estimate accuracy for each step of the plan, proper sequencing of the tasks, updating warnings and cautions as safety procedures may have changed and a review of the BOM’s. 
Your workforce’s skills and experience are dynamic.  As experienced employees leave they are generally replaced with less experienced employees, certainly less experienced in your facility.  Keep this fact in mind as job plans are reviewed and developed, the job plans have to be written to the level of understanding, training and skills of your workforce.  As the number of more senior employees leave the company the level of detail in the job plans may certainly have to increase to ensure continued or even improved performance can be attained.  Are you sure you can’t make a plan to update your job plans?

Precision Maintenance: Belts, Chains, and Sprockets

Today's post by Brandon Weil will add the element of precision to your program.

Belts, chains, and sprockets, chances are you have at least one if not all of these in your facility, and chances are you’re relying heavily on experience and judgment instead of quantitative inspection criteria. All too often the importance of proper inspection techniques and defined replacement criteria for these critical parts are overlooked. Don’t believe me? Just pull up some of your PM inspection procedure, discuss the topic at a tool box meeting, or observe someone performing the inspection, you might be surprised at the range of answers and opinions. If there isn’t a specific measurement or min/max criteria then you’re leaving the inspection up to chance. Another thing to consider is if these parts aren’t being installed properly in the first place you will undoubtedly see premature failures and reduced operational life, inspection criteria applies to installation practice requirements as well.
The good news is that you can start improving the quality of these inspections; all you need are a few basic low-cost tools Click Here and you will find a document with inspection criteria for these three parts to get you started. Improving your PM inspection procedure, putting the right tools in the right hands, and setting quantitative standards for your inspection is a very low-cost high-return activity that can start paying dividends today.

Do You Need More Wedding Planning in Your Plant Outage?

So lets talk about really solid outage planning and scheduling. Not the half-hearten effort that I sometimes see organizations pass off as planning and scheduling, we want to see the good stuff.
Imagine if you will, a wedding. It could be yours or your kids, but think back to that process. Here are just some of the key pieces that were crucial to creating that special day.
Scheduling starts early with all big life turnarounds:
You picked a date for execution of the plan. Hopefully, it was not a reaction to a problem that was brought to your attention during the previous week and instead was scheduled well in advance (a year) and with the full agreement of all parties. It hopefully was picked based on resource availability and with the agreement of both members of the operations team, the bride and groom.
Budget bound:
A high level budget was created based on either what you were willing to spend, what you had available, or what you had been allocated from the parental organization. This at first is an order of magnitude or a not to exceed number that you broke down and further detailed as the planning process was completed.
Experts do what experts do:
Unless weddings are a particularly interesting past time for you then you probably lacked experience in certain areas or may not have had the resources to do all the work internally. For those areas you might have hired an expert. Experts could include professional wedding planners, musicians, tent and table erectors, chefs, photographer, and florist. These people do not always work well together so the coordination was key. For instance if the photographer arrived to do his work before the tent erectors or the florist you could have a real problem on your hands and face embarrassment, lost time and money. That is where the detailed schedule has to be defined and followed.
Planning and then Scheduling:
With all the additional labor needed and all of the task that must be completed in a timely manner you more than likely first built a simple plan and then with time expanded on that plan with detailed steps or task for completion. That plan included pre-work items that had to be done in advance and items that would be executed on the day of the event. The plans included all the important details like what songs to play and what foods to serve. All of these could then be sequenced into the schedule and a critical path review could be performed. Normally here in the US people are not prepared to attend a wedding where it takes two days to complete the ceremony because some forgot to tell the caterer that it was a mid day wedding. Getting all of the activities completed in a 4-6 hour period is important. The critical path tells us if that is possible with the choices we have made. So both time and money become limiting factors that must be attended to. Since we know time lets look at money.
Request for Quote (RFQ) budget refinement:
If you are like me, once you decided on the date, time, and the location and the types of expert that you needed you began to get bids and and built a more complex budget with allocations to each part of the event. There were trade offs and discussions until you finalized the monetary side of the plan. Do you spend more on the dress and less on the flowers? Can we get a DJ instead of an orchestra?
At the two week out point you review the job plans, evaluate weather and family risk and put mitigation strategies into effect as required. Aunt Suzy did not want to set next to uncle Carl so you updated the seating plan one last time. You verify completion of the pre-work and you mentally prepare for the big day by meeting with your operations partner. At this point you cross the final gate and green light the event knowing that it is the best that it can be. 
Your outage should be no different. Everything you see above should be done in the plant too.
Remember all this planning went into one 4-6 hour day and your outage may be a week or even longer. Are you planning and scheduling like a wedding planner or do your weddings aimlessly go on for days?

3 Things You Could Learn From Your Doctor About Reliability.

So when you go to the doctor you expect your problem will be addressed quickly, thoroughly, and at the lowest cost to you. You don't want to spend hours of downtime in the "waiting room." You want a root cause understanding of the problem and a strategy and the drugs to resolves the problem. You want to pay a standard amount deductible and get no surprise bills after the treatment. Operations and Shareholders should expect no less from the maintenance and reliability organization. We should use condition based tools and proactive methods to identify issues early before operations experiences downtime. We should use problem solving tools like root cause analysis to understand the cause of the pain and prevent re-occurrence. Shareholders would prefer that all work be planned and scheduled so that it can be performed at the lowest total cost.
Here are three more things that the doctor does that we should do as well.
When you arrive, the doctor seeks to understand any changes in your life. He checks your vitals and the basic details like weight. He looks for what has changed. When you arrive at a failed piece of equipment you should perform the root cause method called change analysis. You would look at what things have changed. It can fall into categories:

• What has changed (product mix, load etc)
• Who might have changed (new operators or maintainers, different conditions etc)
• How might have it changed (weather etc.)
• When did it change (run at a new time, different shift etc.)
• Why did it change (operations strategy etc.)

If you answer these questions then you can begin to understand the causal chains and root causes.
When you go to the doctor they don't just run one test with one technology. We should use multiple technologies to understand the health of our assets. We might use vibration, infrared themography, oil analysis, Airborne ultrasound as well as others. Using these tools together gives you a full picture of the health of the equipment just like the doctor's test gives him a picture of your health.
The last point I want to note is that the doctor or surgeon uses checklist for procedures. Many sites do not have nor want to create good procedures or checklist. These sites have told me that they do not need them because their craftsmen are skilled and experienced. My point is that the doctor has done common procedures hundreds of times and yet he, a skilled doctor, still uses a checklist. These checklist do not tell him how to tie a stitch but it does point out key measures commonly forgotten steps and verifies that all of his equipment that is used is returned.

Next time you are at your doctor think about what you see him do and how you can use that to professionalize our field.

Maintenance Planners: Are they focused on the future or pulled into the present? Their boss decides!

How does organizational structure dictate focus?
This week I am working with a client that is building their future state organizational structure to support reliability improvement. The question they ask was should the planners report to the maintenance supervisors for the area they plan for? My response was a sometimes controversial one but I truly believe it based on my experience and observations. Planners should not report to maintenance supervisors. They really should be peers in the organizations working as a team. If you set the organization up with planners subordinate to the maintenance supervisor then you are in essence having your future focused planner reporting to your present focused supervisor. By future focused I mean the planner should be building job plans for the future work that will be scheduled at least one week out. Your supervisor is using the plans and schedules to execute the day to day work in the present. If you create this reporting structure and if you believe the old adage “What is important to my boss is important to me” then the planner will be forced to continuously focus on the day to day issues that are important to his or her boss at the expense of the future planned and scheduled work that drives reliability improvement.  They will become a "gofer" for the supervisor and go for this part or go for that tool. This is not planning this is reacting. As you build your organizational structure you have to force proactive thinking and create barriers for some parts of the organization to keep them away from the reactive day to day activities.
What are your thoughts? Who do your planners report to? Are they focused on the proactive future or pulled into the reactive present?

Are the Squirrels Getting In the Way of Reliability in Your Facility? The Movie Series

No today's post is not about fuzzy little animals chewing through your control wiring or completing the circuit to ground in your switch gear although many may have noted these as root causes for reliability issues in the past. Today is about an even a bigger root cause of under-performance in manufacturing today. Squirrel! or as I am calling it corporate distraction. Dug and the rest of the dogs in in the Disney Pixar movie Up suffered from this problem. Lets take a look at a promo clip if you haven't already.

Dug and his compadres, they have trouble staying focused on the task at hand and we can hear that because of the verbalizer around their necks. You see the verbalizer allows us to hear their thoughts. What if you could hear all the thoughts flying around your facility. What distractions might we hear? Is the organization focused on a goal or does it seem to chase after every squirrel that comes along.
Manager that are just making a quick stop as they climb the ladder can be especially affected with corporate distraction. When they hear of an initiative that someone in the organization fancies then they want to do it to impress that person. Just as they get started they find out about another one and in their haste to be promoted they go after that one as well. In a nut shell they over commit and under deliver. I have seen this over and over. It becomes a lot like chasing squirrels, on the way to one you see another one that you just have to go after.
I have also seen managers who live for real bottom line results and long term plant performance. They do not let the squirrels get them off track. They take the time to have a leadership planning session regularly where they look at all of the initiatives that are here or on the horizon for the plant as a whole. They look at the value and return for each and how multiple initiatives might fit together to enable the organization to get to the current vision and the goals that have been set. Sometimes they need to change the goals and adjust the mission to match changing business needs that have arisen but when this happens it is communicated well to the organization. Either way they look at the resources that exist for the plant and the funds available to support improvement initiatives prior to committing the plant to them. The next thing they do is start a high level plant master plan that shows not just what, but how and when they are going to execute the initiatives chosen for the site. They also have gates or systems in place to prevent the new squirrels from distracted them from their current focus as they begin execution.
What do you do in your site to keep the squirrels at bay and the focus on results in the forefront?

Tips for Your Scheduling Process Via Video

Today I thought I would share with you a video post on maintnenance scheduling with a few tips for taking your planned jobs and generating the most effective schedule.

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. 

The 4's and the 8's: Estimating Work Orders Wrong

This week I have been teaching asset management principles and as a part of that we were discussing the work execution process including planning of maintenance work and the schedule that follows. I shared with the group that my experience tells me than many if not most work orders are slotted into half and whole shift time estimates for the schedule. A gentleman from a very large facility chimed in and added some data to the mix. He said within his facility currently 88 percent of the work orders in his backlog were estimated at 8 hours. 6 percent were 4 hours and the remainder were at random intervals.They were half and whole shift...
If you can only achieve that level of accuracy then are the jobs really planned?
The planning process should include breaking down the job into smaller steps where estimation is easier and more accurate. If you are not breaking that job down into the component task then your inherently inaccurate job plans will lead to inaccurate schedules and that will provide for wasted craft time, excessive downtime, and broken delivery promises to operations. Job plans in general do not have to be planned to the minute but 4 hour and 8 hour is definitely not enough.  
What level of planning accuracy would you suggest works for your facility?
to the hour? to the quarter hour? 

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.

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.

Questions from the Field: Wrench Time Studies

Questions: You had mentioned that we should only conduct a wrench time study on planned work.  What is the reasoning behind this?  If they get pulled off of their scheduled job to work on a“sponsored” job, should we terminate the study for that day?  It seems that we have a lot of sponsored work this week and it is somewhat difficult to stay focused on planed/scheduled work.

Answer: That is correct, planned jobs only.

The purpose of the wrench time study is to see how good the planning system is.  If they are pulled off onto sponsored work, the wrench time will likely drop significantly because troubleshooting, looking for parts, looking for prints, and waiting on production are all part of unplanned work but not a part of wrench time.

Of course this is not to say that you cannot continue the study, but it will represent something very different than if they just stayed on planned work.

So it could be as simple as this:

If they stayed on planned work then the wrench time study is a measure of the quality of the planning process.

If they do not stay on planned work, then the wrench time study is a measure the re-activeness of the organization and how well the crafts are able to accomplish unplanned work.

Both of these are valuable, but they represent two totally different things.

Hope this helps.

Andy Page
Principal
Allied Reliability Group

So is it a Planner, a Scheduler, or is it a Planner/Scheduler?

Recently, I had an interesting conversation about staffing the maintenance planner and scheduler roles with in a facility. The question was centered on whether a site should have the two disciplines split or if they should be combined. The answer in my mind is… it depends.
Here are my thoughts on criteria that affect the planner/scheduler organizational structure:
Size of the maintenance workforce:
If you are in a small facility it becomes very hard to support standalone schedulers. For that matter, it is hard to get one person dedicated solely to planning and scheduling. To put some numbers to it I would suggest that in an average maturity facility you will need one planner for every ten to fifteen crafts and one scheduler for every fifty crafts. The number of planners you need may drop as you mature and the job plan library is populated and refined but the scheduler will stay at a fixed level.
Reliability maturity of the facility:
More mature organizations can pool more of the crafts and share across multiple areas for maximum resource efficiency and utilization. If you share resources across multiple areas then that can be a good reason to have a standalone scheduler who devotes his time to working with all of the effected parties and creating a schedule that they can all support.
So if you consider both of these factors than it becomes a bit easier to design your organizational structure but you must keep in mind that as these size and maturity change your structure may have to change as well. 
What are your thoughts?

Top 5 Maintenance and Reliability Acronyms for 2011

As the year comes to a close you begin to see a lot of list. These list cover the top X "somethings" of 2011. They are beginning to show up on the TV, the radio, and the web. In fact, on the way in to the office I heard part of the top 40 pop songs of 2011. With all of these list flying around I could not help but think about the top topics for maintenance and reliability in 2011. I have looked back over conference proceedings, discussion group post, website and blog traffic and have put together a top five acronyms list with a bit of commentary on each.

5. PdM
Predictive Maintenance is one of the maintenance and reliability tools that sites are using more and more in the place of their time based preventive task. This year, as the cost of the technology continue decreasing, more folks are adopting the technologies and wanting to talk about them. I think the key point with PdM is that your work execution process has to be strong or these technologies will just identify a lot more work that you can not get through your planning and scheduling system to execution before it runs to failure.


4. CMMS/EAM
Computerized Maintenance Management Systems/ Enterprise Asset Management Systems continue to be a big discussion point for many folks as they struggle to get the value and return on investment from these systems. Many folks continue to see the CMMS as the solution instead of the tool that enables good processes to be successful.

3. RCA
Root Cause Analysis has been very popular on this blog this year but I must admit it could be because of my focus on it as a great tool to eliminate reoccurring failures and process losses. I think the one point I would share is this: RCA doesn't have to be complicated but it requires a great deal of follow to get good results.

2. BPR
Business Process Re-engineering is a topic we see and hear most discussed around EAM implementations and LEAN projects. This tool and the process that are associated with it can remove a substantial amount of waste from your work flow. The key element for success is not that different from RCA it requires tremendous follow up and a regiment that includes the change management methodologies and our number one topic for 2011... KPIs.

1. KPI
 Key Performance Indicators or metrics as they are sometimes called have been an intense area of focus this year. They generate lots of interest as sites try to figure out where they are and how they compare to others. The one suggestion I would provide for this topic is the following: Don't compare what you dont understand. Take the time to note how the metrics are calculated and how your methodology differs from others you may be comparing with. Too often I see dissimilar metrics compared and poor discisions made based on the conclusions. If you can standardise on metrics using documents like the SMRP Metrics Compendium that is avalible through SMRP.org then you can remove some of the frustration around metrics and KPIs.

I would also be remiss if I did not mention one topic that does not have an acronym yet but was a major topic of interest in 2011.  That topic was the skills crisis or the departure of the baby boomer generation from the work force. Many of the acronyms above are crutial to capturing this departing knowledge and allowing for its use in the future. The key is to start now.
Reliability Now!

Thank you to all of you who have followed this blog this year and I wish you a Happy New Year

Ranting about Reliability: If It Is Not Planned Then It Is Not Scheduled!

Angry old man ranting about reliability

The ornery old man is loose on the RN blog again:

Maintenance organizations complain about getting "no respect." They moan about not being able to get time on the equipment to complete work. They set back and wonder why operations will not partner with them to improve this thing called reliability.

Well let me tell you something...You have to earn respect. Operations does not give you the equipment because you do not give it back when you promised it. You tell them it will be done in four hours and it actually takes twelve. Who wants to partner with a person who doesn't keep their promises.

You want to change this? Then start modeling the behavior that you expect from them. Demonstrate pro-activity.
Do not schedule work that has not been planned. In fact, without some level of planning, how do you even expect to be able to put a duration on it and slot it in the schedule. It can not be done with any accuracy at all.  I'm tied of seeing 4s and 8s. Real maintenance work does not come to you in half and a whole shift blocks. Nor do most maintenance folks have 8 hours of actual wrench time in a day. Lets be real here. You have to at least break the job down into some simple task that are easier to estimate. This will give you a better chance of producing an accurate schedule and building some trust. If you want to learn more about that process check out this blog or this workshop.

The point is, start cleaning up your house before you call out the neighbors in operations. Who knows maybe the neighbors will see the work you are doing and and make a change on their own.
Now get off the internet and make some reliability happen!

Is Your Work Planned or Scheduled... or Neither?

As I  have traveled from site to site and country to county and there are two words that seems to be universally confusing in the maintenance community no matter what language or culture you are a part of. Those words are planned and scheduled. In more than a few "less than best practice" sites I have ask what their percentage planned work was and have heard answers like 90 or 95% then as you ask follow up questions like "How many planners do you have?" you discover that what they really meant was that they schedule 90%. These two words get blended together and as you start to bench mark your site the definitions become both important and telling. So lets clarify these two terms a bit.

I always like to go to Merriam-Webster first and see what they have to say on the matter. They provided the following tidbit of knowledge: 

Definition of PLAN 

transitive verb

1: to arrange the parts of : design <plan a new layout>

2: to devise or project the realization or achievement of <planned their escape>

3: to have in mind : intend <plans to leave soon>

 

intransitive verb

1: to make plans <plan ahead>

2: to have a specified intention —used with on <plans on going>

This tidbit did not really clear up the matter for me so I then reached out to the Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals (SMRP) for the definition in their metrics compendium. In the glossary I found the following: "Planned work is work that has gone through a formal planning process to identify labor, materials, tools, and safety requirements."
Perfect! Now let's understand this word schedule. We will go back to Merriam-Webster for the definition:

Definition of SCHEDULE

transitive verb

1: to appoint, assign, or designate for a fixed time

2 a : to place in a schedule b : to make a schedule of

Now I believe we have all we need to wrap this up.

So if you are talking about planned work, percentage planned work, planned job count or most any other maintenance metric with plan in the title then we are focusing on driving the completion of job packages which contain labor required, parts needed, tools needed and any permits, forms, drawings, or documentation.

If we see the metric "percent scheduled work" or any others that may have scheduled in the title then we are talking about time and how well we were able to stay on the time line for the week's work. 

Later this week I will talk about the relationship between these two words in the maintenance and reliability world. 

The Basics of Reliability Series: Preventive, Predictive, and Precision Maintenance

 

 

With the Triple P M single point lesson, you can cover multiple topics with two diagrams. There are two key points to be driven home with these graphics: first, a solely time-based maintenance strategy is destined to leave you missing the performance mark; and two, precision maintenance concepts and craft skills are imperative to effective maintenance. Other points can be added as the audience allows.

The first diagram shows the six failure curves from the many Reliability Centered Maintenance texts. When you realize that only 11 percent of the failure modes tend toward time-based presentation, you quickly see why a maintenance strategy solely based on time-based preventive maintenance activities is flawed. You also see that doing everything right with precision maintenance is crucial if you want to reduce the number of infant mortality failures.

The second graphic to devote to memory is the I-P-F curve, which shows that the most effective downtime prevention tool is to postpone the failure with precision maintenance and the second most important downtime preventer is to catch the defect early enough using predictive tools to plan and schedule the repair. One more point to make that ties into a later single point lesson on materials is that if you do not store it properly and maintain it in stores, then point S (the point it is put in stores), point I, and point P can become one and the same.

On this single point lesson, you can also talk about how, based on recent studies of PM maintenance tasks, the following holds true for the average facility:

·         30% of the PM tasks add no value.

·         30% of the PM tasks in the average facility could be more effective and efficient if they were done with PdM tools.

·         30% of the PM tasks should be reengineered to address the failure modes of the asset.

·         10% of the PM tasks are fine the way they are.

This sheds a bit of light on another substantial area of waste that can be removed with a plan and some patience.