Springfield Resources

“MAINTENANCE ISN’T SEXY—until something explodes.” PM’s quiet, unseen work keeps businesses running smoothly, but its absence is loud and costly. We toil in the shadows. ?We do our job that allows everyone else in the company to do their job, and nobody knows our name. That is the way we like it! ?There is no spotlight on our work. ?No grandstanding, no applause, when things go well, no thank you either. ?Maybe an occasional thank you would be nice. The picture rapidly changes when something big goes wrong. ?We hear, “Where is maintenance?” “Get it running.” And occasionally, afterward, “You’re my hero!”?(I can daydream, can’t I?) So, what exactly should we focus on? ?What we know is right or what everyone yells about? ?That is an excellent question.?It is a question we should discuss with the team. The Stories of PM delves into that question.?I’ve attached a free excerpt. You can also go to Amazon.com to take a look directly.??https://lnkd.in/e8ymaKxq

How on Earth do you get people to want to fill out complete, accurate, and informative work orders? Joel Levitt [email protected]?? Comics at: https://lnkd.in/eJtwKHVR In my years of visiting organizations and helping them improve their maintenance function, there has been?one almost universal thing. The quality of the work orders in most organizations sucks! They are incomplete, they are inaccurate, they are uninformative, and they don’t contribute to a better maintenance future. To remedy this, I’ve stressed the fields that must be accurate?and?what must be filled out in the maintenance management training. I’ve also provided tips to improve the quality of the work orders. I am quite proud of defining the training needed for different people, making up rules to follow, and giving suggestions to improve the whole work order process. Ho hum. Not very inspiring. ?If my consultant colleagues concentrate on the same things as I do, it is no wonder that work orders still suck. I’ve been working on a comic book series about basic maintenance (Elements of Great Maintenance Management). The seventh comic is about the CMMS (if you don’t know what that stands for, you can pretty much stop here). I’ve been grappling with why they should do a great job with work orders rather than how to do a great job with work orders. Of course, I could use the famous line from every parent— “Because I told you to do it.”?But that is not deeply inspiring. What I settled on was to talk about all the cool things you could get out of the system that would make their job easier or more interesting and enjoyable. What if the maintenance folks became more involved in generating answers to questions instead of just entering data? The questions that the CMMS can quickly answer are things like: ·??????What should we focus on? ·??????Which assets are the bad actors? ·??????Which parts do we use excessively? ·??????Are the tasks on the PM list worth it? Or capabilities that alert us that a PM is also due when we are setting up to go do a corrective job. Things like that. My question for you is, what do you do to make work orders less of a chore, and how do you motivate workers to do a great job? Caution: if I like the idea, I will borrow it! Don’t worry a bit; when I’m done, I’ll return it.

This new class is for people curious about the new tech and where it fits. I decided to design a new class in maintenance management. It is quite different from my and (as far as I can see) my training colleagues' offerings. I wanted to investigate new inspection, analytics, and AI technologies and map them into legacy maintenance departments. I am curious about how you fit cool tech into existing companies. It would be great if we also had wands to wave to move us forward with the (seemingly) inevitable implementation pain. The class is virtual. For details, please go to: https://lnkd.in/etn4n_Jt Thanks!

More Maintenance does not mean More Reliability By Joel Levitt CMRP, CMPP, CRL ?[email protected] ???????????https://lnkd.in/eVMR-nGS Waddington Effect Conrad Hal (C.H.) Waddington (1905-1975) was a developmental biologist, paleontologist, geneticist, and embryologist. He was rather unlikely to make major contributions to the field of maintenance. The story goes back to WWII. He paused his biology studies to work for the British Royal Air Force (RAF). His mission was to make the hunting and destruction of German U-boats more effective. His operations research team studied many problems, such as the color of the bombers (changing their belly color to make them harder to see resulted in a 20% increase in opportunities) and at what depth the depth charges should be set off (changing to 25’ from 100’ increased the kill ratio by 7). From our perspective, he made his greatest contribution studying maintenance and repair records. Conventional wisdom at the time held that if more preventive maintenance events were performed on each aircraft, fewer problems would exist—and problems found by inspection could be caught and fixed. Come to think of it that is still conventional wisdom! The B-24 Liberator bombers spent half their time in the shop or waiting to go into the shop. The Waddington Team plotted the number of reported unscheduled problems by the hours of flight time. The problems peaked right after the 50-hour service and fell until the next 50-hour service when they peaked again. After their deep analysis, they recommended four simple changes: 1. Extending the time between repairs 2. Identifying components that need to be included or excluded in a particular maintenance event? 3. Better allocation and scheduling of maintenance staff? 4. Developing clearer, more concise, and unambiguous documentation. The result? 60% increased flight time per plane. Good going, Conrad!

I just received a communication from LinkedIn. This is my 16th anniversary of being on LinkedIn. I don't know why that surprised me, but it still seems recent. Of course, I remember dial phones and 3 networks. I'm happy I made it this far.

Loans not charity

I've been thinking about work orders. When I started with CMMS products (I worked for an early CMMS vendor), we had one big problem wherever we went: getting complete and accurate work order data. That was in 1982. A fleet lead hand said he couldn't type because his fingers were too fat (I visualized him with cucumber-sized fingers)! Anyway, I was working on a slide for a presentation titled: What is in it for you? Work orders are good for you. Here is the list I came up with: ?Opportunity to spend a bit of time thinking. ?Contribute your ideas to future maintenance folks. ?What exactly happened? Can we fix this failure mode permanently? ?Add whatever you learn to your knowledge base. ?Did anyone record any weird things from the last time? ?How did we do (steps) the job last time? ?Is there a better way to do it? ?How long did it take? ?Where did we get …? ?Were there any safety, environmental incidents, or near misses? ?Is this event a pattern or a one-off event? ?Maybe we should replace the asset. How much have we spent? Thoughts?