Seven Words You Shouldn’t Say in Maintenance
By William J. Goetz, Vice President of Corporate Development
When I was a teenager, my neighbor had a recording of George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” We listened to it doubled over with laughter and worked hard enough on the list of seven words that I can still recite them today.
It cut through the gentile facade of 1970s television like a hot knife through butter. George Carlin also threw taboo words around like candy in a Mardi Gras parade, and we laughed just to hear him say them. It was a brilliant piece to us, and it helped reshape our perceptions of the gap between popular entertainment and teenage reality.
Thinking about Carlin’s piece and the idea that reliability is cultural got me thinking about what the language we use can tell us about maintenance cultures. With that in mind, this blog will highlight seven words and phrases that are rarely used in a reliable plant but often used in a reactive plant.
After doing some research, testing ChatGPT and having several enlightening conversations, I came up with seven naughty words you shouldn’t say in maintenance:
- Breakdown
- Defer
- Emergency
- Expedite
- Overdue
- Overtime
- Repeated
Okay, this list may not be as funny as Carlin’s, but cut me some slack — I’m writing about maintenance.
If you frequently say things like, “The lube pump is broken again” or “The coupling sounds like it’s going to break,” you might be reactive.
When reliability culture is strong, these words are used only infrequently — breakdowns should prompt less than 5% of maintenance work. Scheduled “break-ins” should be similarly rare. If you find yourself saying “broke” or any of its derivatives a lot, you’re probably in a reactive maintenance environment. The same goes for “Put that off until next month” or “Production wants a deferral.”
If you regularly defer maintenance, you might be reactive.
Kicking the can down the road is a bad habit. If you are regularly saying “Defer that ’til next month” or “Production wants a deferral”, you might be reactive. When an asset finally fails, fixing it will steal away time, energy and resources that could be used for improved productivity. It will eventually get done, but the downtime, lost production, potential for collateral damage to the asset and safety impacts will all be greater when you run an asset to failure.
If you’re constantly in a state of emergency, pinballing from one repair job to another, you might be reactive.
If your personal time is often interrupted by calls from the plant because you’re urgently needed on site, you’re probably scratching your head over the term “reliability culture”. It may feel good to be part of a team that is willing to drop everything to make a repair, but it’s bad for business. Unexpected breakdowns cause production losses and can also lead to safety incidents. Strong reliability cultures rarely have events that disrupt personal calendars.
If “Expedite that” or “I’m not a planner, I’m an expeditor” are a regular part of your discourse, you might be reactive.
Using phrases like these frequently means that your stock of spare parts is poorly aligned with your plant’s maintenance needs. Your MRO management systems and processes may make it too hard to find the right parts in stock.
Strong reliability cultures display an excellent connection between their assets and the parts they keep on hand. They also demonstrate a detailed understanding of asset criticality and balance stock against the risks of needing a repair for a particular part. Generally, they spend less on spares because they order only when they know they will use the part.
If your PMs are overdue, you might be reactive.
Reactive maintenance disrupts schedules and delays preventive work. The more reactive you are, the bigger your backlog is likely to be. If you’re talking about overdue PMs as you make a repair to a failed asset, you should take it as a sign.
Craftsmen and contractors love overtime, like when they’re called in on the weekend to make a repair and get paid time-and-a-half or even double-time. But if overtime is a common occurrence at your plant, you might be reactive!
Similarly, you might be reactive if you’re often forced to attend to repeated failures, you might be reactive. The old adage that shortcuts make for long delays is a truism for maintenance. My father, who ran a plant, often said, “There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it twice.”
Sacrificing workmanship for the sake of getting equipment back online quickly is just setting yourself up for a return visit. That doesn’t mean that your teams can’t find more efficient or effective ways of making repairs. However, they should always be looking for improvements and documenting them in the maintenance plan for the asset, not winging it for a faster repair in the field.
Memorize the seven telling words above. If you’re using any of them daily or even weekly, you might be reactive.
PCA can help. We have well-established methods for working with plant and corporate leadership to fix reactive maintenance environments and instill preventive maintenance practices. We’ll get the full team on board and drive the adoption of a strong reliability culture to give these seven words a rest.