By William J. Goetz, Vice President of Corporate Development

Reliability is an inherently technical discipline and it attracts people, like myself, who enjoy statistics, analytics, engineering, technology, mathematics, physics and the like. We tend to write a lot about how to measure improvement and what improvement means for the business. Indeed, these are meaningful, valuable topics and they land smack in the middle of our comfort zones. Nevertheless, none of the good things that reliability does for the business happen without also getting the people on board and this blog is about what’s in it for them!

Competition for skilled workers in today’s labor market is intense. Every advantage matters. Maintenance and Operations working together to improve asset reliability creates a dramatically better work environment than break-fix, reactive maintenance and operations. Reliable assets are safer, they promote greater teamwork and provide greater job satisfaction and they give all employees a better work-life balance. Here are a few proof points in the words of the people who have experienced these transformations.

Safety

With respect to the attributes that make a work environment attractive, safety comes first! Given a choice nearly everyone will choose a work setting with a lower risk of injury over a high-risk setting.

The relationship between reliability and safety is intuitively obvious. Catastrophic failures of equipment in an industrial setting have the potential to release huge amounts of energy, creating a dangerous situation for anyone nearby. But it’s not only the catastrophic failures, it’s also the functional failures that cause transient conditions that lead to unsafe conditions. While transient conditions typically account for less than 10% of the time during a year, fully half of all safety incidents occur during these transient conditions. It’s no surprise to see the benefits of higher reliability recognized in safety performance.

Paper Mill Production Manager:

“I love what the best practices have done for us. A year ago, we were the worst performing plant in our company with respect to safety. We had an OSHA Incident Rate over 3. Now that we have established Planning, Scheduling and Reliability practices as how we do business, we are much more stable with minimal chaos. We went from worst in the company for safety to first in the company with no recordable injuries in the past year.“

The plant achieved this improvement in safety performance while their paper machine availability increased by 4%. Reliability and Safety are a win-win for every business!

Teamwork and Job Satisfaction

Most people enjoy teamwork. Nearly everyone wants the opportunity to do their job well, without being rushed or forced to work with the wrong tools. Well organized teams that are figuratively on the same page of their playbook, will outperform even the most talented group of individuals – no matter what the event. Manufacturing teams are no different. The quote from an Operations and Maintenance Coordinator below highlights how a team builds momentum off its own success and morale improves. He said,

“Overall morale of the team, the operations team and especially area mechanics, has noticeably improved. I attribute this mostly to better streamlining/standardizing our work system. One of the keys of MWS [work management process implementation] success for the Utilities group has been consistency and organization. The better we are at planning and scheduling, the better we are at execution. Production Operators are seeing more quality work being accomplished and experiencing less upsets. Technicians are not constantly being pulled away from jobs they are on and are being given the time to do jobs with precision. The more work that gets completed as a team, the more motivation there is to keep up the momentum.“

There is no question about the importance of job satisfaction to employee retention. In today’s labor market, companies can minimize employee turnover by investing in reliability and boosting job satisfaction.

Work-Life Balance

Today millennials expect and demand greater work-life balance. It is as simple as that! As employment demographics shift and millennials make up an increasingly large share of the workforce, supporting work-life balance will become a vital employee retention strategy. Reliability programs are a great way for manufacturers to improve work-life balance.

PCA’s Bruce Hawkins, CMRP has written a series of blogs that describe the journey to reliability excellence he experienced at a chemical manufacturer in the Southeastern United States. I asked him to comment on how the journey affected him personally. He said,

“My work-life balance was GREATLY improved when the plant became reliable:

• Fewer midnight or weekend calls
• Able to leave the plant on time more often
• Increased confidence in decisions because I had the data to back them up
• Better relationship with Operations
• Overall, less job-related stress“

His experience was echoed by another PCA client, “Proper planning and scheduling is the only way to allow time for precision maintenance. Precision maintenance is the only way to stay ahead of issues. Staying ahead of issues lessens the phone calls you get at midnight.”

While there is a growing body of proofs regarding the right technical approach to boosting reliability, the best technical solutions are nothing if they leave the people behind. Safety, teamwork, job satisfaction and work-life balance are among the most important aspects of employment today. Hopefully, the quotes cited here can help organizations rally their teams around the long-term personal rewards to be had by improving reliability.

If you are interested in more, give us a call at 770.717.3727 or email us at info@pcaconsulting.com. We can help.