Upon visiting a very successful company a couple of weeks ago, I got engaged in a serious conversation with their management on why their PM program wasn’t enough to allow them to reach optimum performance. I believe the following findings can be repeated in many plants across all industries so wanted to share it with you.

It seems that the plants leadership has worked over the past 2 years to put in place a complete PM program for all of its process control equipment. To their credit, they did a good job of identifying key assets and drafting an outline of what needed to be done and how frequently they should do it but that’s where the effort came to a stop.

Though they took a good first pass at the mentioned program, they failed to involve shop floor personnel in defining key equipment and leveraging their experience and knowledge to define what needed to be done and how often the PM should be scheduled. As you might guess, this caused a credibility gap when the program was rolled out, one which they never really recovered from.

The next shortcoming was the lack of using a formal process to get at the root of what needed to be looked at based on cost to do and consequences of failure. This allowed a number of PM’s to be put in place that really were a waste of time and dollars due to the very limited payback that could be expected vs the outlay of resources to accomplish the work. This is where a structured approach such as Maintenance Task Analysis (MTA), or for key critical assets, the use of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) would be a tremendous help in insuring the right work would be done at the right time.

Another shortfall to the approach that was taken was the lack of understanding for what Predictive Maintenance (PdM) concepts could do for them relative to seeing problems starting to develop prior to their becoming an issue. Time based maintenance is just to hit and miss for the majority of failures we try to catch when attempting to improve equipment reliability and performance. This is backed by documented findings that over 80% of all failure is random in nature.

Another shortfall that I would like to touch on is the importance of documenting the findings while performing a PM. Actually this needs to be done for all work, including the Reactive Maintenance carried out each day. This documented data allows you to understand exactly what and where your failures are occurring. This information really becomes the key to improving future performance. The data needs to be captured, documented and trended so as to be of the most value in sorting out what you want to focus on to drive improvement.

The company I’m relating to didn’t understand how critical these steps were and thus really evolved to what I call the ‘Poke and Hope’ approach to driving improvement.

As you think about the short comings listed here, I would encourage you to consider how your respective programs were developed and how well they are serving your needs. Does any of this sound like what might be taking place within your organization? I believe you’ll agree that this true story could be happening to you. Good Luck!

January 11th, 2010   Al Weber   Process & Practices - Strategy & Leadership   Leave a Comment »