By Bruce Hawkins, Senior Maintenance and Reliability Consultant, PCA

The previous four articles covered the importance to success of the business case and executive support, getting work management right, reliability improvements, and MRO best practices. While they are described separately, in reality they are interdependent. The journey would not have been complete or the objectives of our mission fulfilled if one of them had been left out.

The series begins with a description of the business case and executive support because that set the conditions for the entire program. The first article also highlights the tremendous business success that the program generated. Staking a claim to the potential benefits at the beginning is important to gaining executive support but the ongoing flow of business performance improvement is critical to maintaining that support.

The second article in the series emphasized the importance of the work management process, which is central to the program. All reliability improvement initiatives initially add work to the system, so the work management process needs to be able to efficiently execute this work. Reliability transformations take place during normal business operations. The work you have been doing does not suddenly go away or really change to any significant degree until the journey has been underway for six months or more. Redesign and operator requested work needs to be prioritized alongside ongoing maintenance work. The operations and maintenance organizations need to fully commit to the process and have complete confidence that the right work will get done.

The journey would not have been complete without significant gains in equipment reliability. By making our assets more reliable, we made work go away. We carefully studied asset failures and removed many common causes, resulting in huge increases in mean time between failure, less waste, and higher availability of nearly all assets. While these gains were essential to the program, making them steadily and in balance with meeting normal operational requirements was critical. This is such an important lesson for those who are ready engineer their way to greater reliability. If you pile too much on the horse, it might not swim all the way across the river.

The last article tied in the gains we realized from improvements in our MRO storeroom and procurement practices. Most companies should be able to realize similar gains and achieve them faster than we did. We found our way through over time but knowing where to look should be a great help to others. MRO catalog standardization offers great potential benefits with respect to narrowing the scope of stocked items and helping to consolidate vendors. We would have been much better off if we had been able to bring catalog standardization into the scope of our SAP implementation at the beginning.

The changes in work environment and job satisfaction that our teams enjoyed as the fruits of this journey were tremendous. Eventually, everyone was on board with the sense that we were always improving, that our roles were clear and that we could count on fewer and fewer negative surprises.

My top takeaways from the journey to reliability excellence are:

• Reliability excellence is cultural; it’s about how people do their work. Culture change takes leadership but the changes themselves are hugely rewarding to the teams that take them on
• Leadership commitment and the business case are inextricably linked. Start with the business case and do not fall to the temptation to understate it!
• You need your teams following the same playbook. Excellent execution of maintenance work management is essential.
• Reliability improvement is a long game that gets better with data. Do not rush it and make sure your failure coding, RCM and RCFA practices are top notch.
• Do not forget to keep the storeroom in scope. Repairs that return an asset to full capability are rarely possible without the right parts.

As a consultant, I always enjoy visiting plants at various stages of the reliability journey. While no two journeys are the same, it often takes me back to the hurdles we crossed more than a decade ago.