World-Class, Old-School, or Wrong-Thinking?

Change is all around us. If you think about it, every aspect of our lives involves change of some sort. The degree of mechanization and automation that we are experiencing in modern society is unprecedented in history.

Hyper-competition and continuous product improvements are leading to mass-customization demands for better quality services and products, with relevant features and functions, delivered faster to the marketplace, at more competitive prices.?

Today, in the manufacturing sector, there is a constant push for innovative product design and improvements in productivity while capital budgets for new installations, replacement equipment and operations/maintenance budgets for existing equipment are reduced or eliminated. Add to this the ongoing challenge of ensuring physical assets in the manufacturing plant continue to perform satisfactorily until the end of their useful life.?

How well the modern enterprise manages these key aspects today will directly affect the company's success in this economic climate.

Darwinism suggests that business survival tactics today must involve developing sensible and defensible physical asset management strategies as a top priority. Now, it has already been proven that sticking our head in the proverbial sand will certainly not make the situation ‘go away’. It often requires seemingly contradictory actions to be taken in order to meet the challenges we face.

For example, lowering capital acquisition budgets means extending existing asset lifecycles. This can increase maintenance costs, require more repair labor, parts and tools. Reducing maintenance costs inappropriately may lead to lower equipment performance, less product throughput, lower product quality, higher safety incidents, more environmental breaches, and so on.

Confounding this is our profound change in understanding of what must be done to successfully manage today's most complex physical asset systems, from both the technical and organizational perspective. It is not uncommon to find that even the most respected people we work with either 'get it wrong' or 'don't get it'. Needless to say, bad business decisions often lead to counterproductive, physically dangerous and sometimes horrendous environmental consequences.

In the interest of improving our quality-of-life and advancing our collective societal knowledge, it may be beneficial to identify some of the top concerns that we encounter in our day-to-day business affairs.?

More important, it is revealing to learn what the position is of three commonly encountered perspectives that exist in industry. In our context, we'll call these 'must-know' leadership viewpoints Old-School, Wrong-Thinking and World-Class:

• Old-School: someone who - for whatever reason - denies how things fail and the very real consequences that can result when assets do fail. They may even choose to ignore ethics and morals for a variety of reasons. Root causes include: stuck in their old habits, overworked/stressed, overconfident ego/pride, lack of faith/courage, lack of knowledge/problem-solving skills, unable to handle unexpected events. (i.e. failures - or worse - the consequences of failures) These personality types would rather escape from a situation (i.e. through avoidance) rather than face it.?

Note:?It is important to recognize that Old-Schools are typically not ignorant of what they are doing. Here, we draw a distinction between being 'Old-School' and being unaware (or uneducated). Not having access to (or the opportunity of) education and/or training programs/budgets is a completely different matter.

• Wrong-Thinking: someone who wittingly or unwittingly makes unfounded (Read: risky, reckless, or dangerous) and impromptu business decisions, that are rash, illogical, and/or contradictory to normal behavior in society.
• World-Class: someone who consistently makes sound business decisions that represent the safe minimum work that needs to be done on the physical asset systems. In other words, physical asset management tasks which are scientifically-based, technically feasible and worth doing based on sensible and defensible (i.e. factual) information.

Focus #1 - The primary objective of the maintenance function

• Old-School: The primary objective of maintenance is to optimize plant availability at minimum cost.
• Wrong-Thinking: Maintenance is a necessary evil.?

"Hey, if it ain't broke don't fix it!"

• World-Class: Maintenance affects all aspects of the business: safety, environmental integrity, energy efficiency and product quality, not just plant availability and cost.

Focus #2 - What maintenance is

• Old-School: Maintenance is all about preserving physical assets.
• Wrong-Thinking: Maintenance is all about fixing equipment once it has failed.
• World-Class: Maintenance is all about preserving the functions of physical assets.

Focus #3 - Likelihood of age-related failure

• Old-School: Most equipment becomes more likely to fail as it gets older.
• Wrong-Thinking: Doing more maintenance on the equipment makes it safer and prevents it from getting old.
• World-Class: Most failures are not more likely to occur as equipment gets older.

Focus #4 - What proactive maintenance is

• Old-School: Proactive maintenance is all about preventing failures.
• Wrong-Thinking: There's no such thing as proactive maintenance. If the equipment ever fails, fix it or replace it.
• World-Class: Proactive maintenance is about avoiding, eliminating or minimizing the consequences of failures.

Focus #5 - Generic maintenance programs

• Old-School: Generic maintenance programs can be developed for most types of physical assets.
• Wrong-Thinking: Generic maintenance programs are a waste of time, money and effort. Spend time and money only IF?the assets fail.
• World-Class: Generic maintenance programs only apply to equipment with the same operating context, functions and performance standards.

Focus #6 - Failure data and decision-making

• Old-School: Comprehensive data about failure rates must be available before it is possible to develop successful maintenance strategies.
• Wrong-Thinking: The best maintenance strategy to employ is 'Run-To-Failure'.?
• World-Class: Decisions about maintenance will nearly always have to be made with inadequate hard data about failure rates.

Focus #7 - Catastrophe elimination using protection

• Old-School: The probability of catastrophic failures can be almost eliminated by fitting suitable protection.
• Wrong-Thinking: Since catastrophic failures seldom happen, resources are wasted on protection. Resources can be employed better elsewhere in our company.
• World-Class: Protection can also fail, so the risks associated with protected systems still need to be managed.

Focus #8 - The main types of maintenance?

• Old-School: There are three basic types of maintenance: predictive, preventive and corrective.
• Wrong-Thinking: There is only one kind of maintenance: corrective.

Anything else is 'hype' concocted by the Manufacturers (OEMs) & Consultants.

• World-Class: There are four main types of maintenance: predictive, preventive, detective and corrective.

Focus #9 - Predictive task frequency selection

• Old-School: The frequency of predictive tasks should be based on the frequency of the failure and/or the criticality of the item.
• Wrong-Thinking: Predictive tasks are a waste of time, money and effort. Company resources can be better spent preparing for an emergency posture. This way, if the equipment ever fails, we'll be ready to fix things and clean-up!
• World-Class: The frequency of predictive tasks should be based on the failure development period (or "lead time to failure" or "P-F interval")

Focus #10 - Maintenance policy formulation

• Old-School: Maintenance policies should be formulated by managers and maintenance schedules drawn up by suitably qualified specialists or external contractors (a top-down approach)
• Wrong-Thinking: The only maintenance policy that matters is:

"Fix the assets if they ever breakdown". ?

• World-Class: Maintenance policies should be formulated by the people closest to the assets. Management should provide the tools to help them make the right decisions, and ensure the decisions are sensible and defensible.

Focus #11 - PM design involvement

• Old-School: The maintenance department on its own can develop a successful, lasting maintenance program.
• Wrong-Thinking: Operations runs the equipment - Maintenance fixes it IF it breaks-down. Engineering replaces the equipment in a capital project when Management says so.
• World-Class: A successful, lasting maintenance program can only be developed by maintainers and users of the assets working together.

Focus #12 - OEM PM programs

• Old-School: Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are in the best position to develop maintenance programs for new physical assets.
• Wrong-Thinking: The OEMs just want to?"line their pockets"?with future replacement (spare) parts.

Just run the equipment to failure and repair/replace if it ever does.

• World-Class: OEMs can only play a limited (but still important) role in developing maintenance programs for new assets.

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Curious to know how the people in your organization think? Reach out to us and have your people take our survey.

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Carlo Odoardi is a Maintenance & Reliability Strategist with a passion for helping asset-intensive companies achieve sustainable, world-class operational performance. For more than 30 years he has consulted extensively on industrial culture change, business transformation, advanced industrial technologies and Management Information Systems. Today, he specializes in the design and implementation of physical asset reliability standards, practices, processes and enabling technologies. Carlo is an?RCM Practitioner, holds a Master of Engineering degree from the Intelligent Machines and Manufacturing Research Centre (IMMRC) at?McMaster University?and an Associate’s degree in Electronics Engineering Technology from?Ryerson University. He is Past Chair,?Society for Maintenance & Reliability Professionals?(SMRP) Ontario Chapter.

Carlo Odoardi, M.Eng.

COCO NET PALM?

Email:?[email protected]