By Bruce Hawkins, Senior Maintenance and Reliability Consultant, PCA

This blog is the second in a series of four based on my presentation at the 2021 Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals Conference.

One of the key learnings we had is that it is impossible to implement advanced reliability solutions until the foundation is solid. Maintenance has to be able to get the work done before attacking anything else. Work process is always first and focusing on it first provides a springboard for success in the future. It will enable advanced technologies to bear full fruit.

We started our journey by creating a future state. The design team that put it together was made up of about 40 individuals from across our plants who benchmarked other companies. They looked for companies that were near world class performance, figured out how they got there, what characteristics of their organizations were in place, and they distilled this information down into a future state design that included several key elements to drive reliability:

• Reliability Centered Maintenance Analysis to develop the most effective maintenance strategy for our critical assets
• Autonomous Maintenance where the operators performed routine cleaning and inspection of the machinery to identify problems that needed to be addressed
• Implementation of key Predictive Maintenance tools to identify problems early in the failure progression

Our initial results were very, very positive. We got very enthusiastic support from operations for the autonomous maintenance pillar because now operators had a better way to get their issues fixed. We had some low hanging fruit that provided some real early savings that we got from both the autonomous maintenance piece and from RCM.

After a few years and early wins, the initiative began to lose steam. We found out that acceptance varied by site, and we had some plant managers that were resistant. Operations became disillusioned with the autonomous maintenance activities because they were there cleaning the machine, and they find something wrong that maintenance could not fix at the time. They would write a notification in SAP and hang a red tag on the on the piece of equipment that was causing the problem. Three months later, there were still a bunch of red tags all over the system.

We also found that we could do a really good job of RCM analysis, but we did a poor job of RCM task implementation. We were wondering what was going on. We started looking at our process data and we found we had still had a lot of opportunity for improvement. We developed an audit process on that future state design. We found out that the lot of the work management process was not going very well. True planning was not occurring. We were not gaining the workforce efficiencies that we thought we needed to make. We were doing PMs, but they were not effective at preventing failures. We were still having breakdowns and predictive maintenance was not as effective as it could have been.

Then the “AHA” moment occurred. I received an issue of Maintenance Technology magazine with an article that described how best to implement reliability solutions. The advanced concepts of RCM, Predictive Maintenance, and Autonomous Maintenance rest on a foundation of a good Work Management process. This is needed to be able to handle all of the new work being identified by those advanced concepts. In our case, the new work that was being generated by autonomous maintenance, predictive maintenance, and RCM was jamming up the process! We did not put as much initial effort into shoring up our work management process as we should have. We put the autonomous maintenance program and the RCM analysis program on hold and focused on fixing it.

We implemented a revised work management process, and we put up an audit system in place to make sure it was being followed. The audit system was very simple. We selected a relatively complex work order that had been completed and assembled anyone who had anything to do with that work order in a conference room. We invited the requester, the planner who planned it, the craftsmen who executed it, their supervisor, and the stores attendant who kitted the parts. We also brought in all the data that was produced during each one of those steps. It became painfully obvious when they were sitting in that room if the wrong priority code was used, the wrong order type was selected, the description of the needed work was poor, if the job plan was poor, if the craftsman did not add completion comments, etc. We learned that public embarrassment is a great change management tool!