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KPIs and Communication, are they really linked?

Monday, July 20th, 2009

It seems that any time we talk about building a strong organization, a key component of success is effective communications.

I strongly agree and believe you can’t get there without it. For communications to be effective, it must be two way and done in a way that provides meaningful information to all parties involved. That is where KPIs play a key part in your success.

In order to have good communications, it’s important for the information being conveyed to be timely, pertinent to the needs of the people involved, easy to access and easy to relate to. Hence, the creation of a few vital KPIs will play a critical part of your being successful.

To generate lots of words usually loses the true value of what your trying to say. However, having the ability to be concise and showing vital measures to folks goes a long way towards keeping the organization interested in what’s being said and ‘tuned in’ to the message you want to pass along. These KPIs have the ability to show everyone how they are doing –and it only takes a few moments of their time. I think you would agree that’s a win/win for everyone, easy to generate and easy for everyone to relate to when your out on the shop floor. 

It’s also very important to create leading and lagging KPI’s as you give this approach your consideration. I’ll talk about these more in future blog postings.

You can’t communicate very well without good content and well selected KPIs to share what’s important with everyone. Please remember that the key to success is to communicate, communicate, communicate and have your critical KPIs tied into the message. Good luck!

July 20th, 2009      Strategy & Leadership   Leave a Comment »

Information Systems for our personnel-Key for success

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

As we sit back and look for what are critical components for our maintenance and reliability programs, the topic of information systems quickly comes to the forefront. In today’s world, information is usually a key part of keeping informed about the world we live in.

When at work, it isn’t any different as information is usually plentiful but hard to access in a friendly manner so that we may perform our responsibilities in an efficient manor. Our folks want to evaluate the health and condition of our assets on a regular basis but most often they struggle with an ‘easy’ way to summarize and determine if there are any problems starting to develop. We need to provide our organizations with friendly information systems that make themselves easy to access, then simplify finding our way to the particular piece of equipment we want to evaluate.

Many times we hear the phrase that ‘information is king’ and having the ability for all of our operations, maintenance and support folks to access it makes that same information that much more valuable and critical to our being successful. Having this type of friendly, easy to use system goes a long way in also helping to create a feeling of asset ownership. When we can come to work each day and have easy access to the information that shows us how good of a job we’re doing, how can we not get better?

The information system technology is there today, are we?

June 18th, 2009      Strategy & Leadership   Leave a Comment »

Sharing-It really can make a difference

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

Many of us have been working at improving asset performance via better maintenance and reliability for a long time. Some of our undertakings have worked really well and others have felt like they hit a wall. Independent of how good we think our ideas have been, we’ve run into obstacles that have made moving ahead really hard to do.

Some of these start with getting management buy in and expand all the way to the lacking of shop floor support for these ‘great’ ideas that we think can make a difference. As we learn how to work through these various obstacles, our skills at selling ideas and helping folks get on board steadily improve. We also get more skilled at learning what won’t work in our particular environment.

Now for the important part.

Think about how helpful these experiences can be if shared with others who are struggling with the same issues. That’s where it really helps to consider presenting your respective stories with other practitioners at events such as the SMRP conference help once per year, along with many other avenues which allow you to SHARE. This would also factor into the expanding of our networking with others which always proves to be of added value. I would close with the reminder that it’s not only the successes but the failures as well that are so very important to share. We can all learn from each other, the good and the not so good. Good Luck!

June 11th, 2009      Strategy & Leadership   Leave a Comment »

Technology- Why is it a key to Reliability

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

As we think about what it takes to obtain improved reliability, the need for understanding and leveraging technology becomes more visible to folks. Many of us are learning how to collect lots of really good condition monitoring data in an efficient manor, but then what? We also have the responsibility to take advantage of all the preventive maintenance and operator inspections being gathered but when you truly think about it, how well are you doing?

The simple truth remains that for quite a long time now,we no longer have had the resources to compile all of this data and convert it into information in a ‘timely way’. The impact of that is straight forward, we aren’t capitalizing on the collected data in a way to truly catch deterioration of our assets prior to it impacting asset performance. This results in disruption to our process which results in increased downtime, less then first class quality, and increased costs for spare parts due to secondary damage. Can we really afford that?

Another key factor is the negative impact on the morale of our people. Many of our folks are spending lots of very valuable time collecting info from thousands of data points and we aren’t using it in a timely manner to catch failure before it happens. What a turn off! The key to turning this around is simple, look at using technology to monitor and manage all of this. It’s available, very easy to use and will do it very close to real time. Further more, it will only call your attention to where you need to be concerned and not to where all is going well. When you think about it, isn’t that how we really want to care for our business?

You owe it to yourself and all you work with to at least look into what this technology is all about. Good luck!

June 3rd, 2009      Strategy & Leadership   Leave a Comment »

Teamwork-One of the keys to Reliability

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

As many folks discuss the key components to helping achieve reliability, it isn’t always clear that a critical component is that of teamwork between operations and maintenance. As both groups participate in key initiatives such as using RCM and MTA, their respective expertise brings many vital points of understanding to the exercise. The operators know more than most when things start to drift off the norm even though they might not know why.  The maintenance folks can then start to define the technical logic around how the process is changing to create this drift, thus start to define what can and should be done about it along with the ‘who’ should be making the required corrections.

By participating in this type of interaction in an ongoing manner, both the operators and those maintaining the asset develop a much deeper understanding of how the process ‘really’ works and what are the most effective ways to determine when the drift/failure is starting to occur and what to do about it. Along with this new level of understanding, the team will also find itself in a much better position to figure out how to see this deterioration coming, thus create the proactive tasks to catch them prior to process disruption. It’s through this high level of working together that all involved also develop a much higher level of ownership in caring for the health and performance of the equipment involved. In the end, isn’t that what we really want to have happen?

May 28th, 2009      Strategy & Leadership   Leave a Comment »

Cash flow issues- How to move forward

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

After just returning from MARCON 09, the one underlying theme that had many folks really struggling to move reliability improvement ahead in their respective organizations was the issue around company cash flow. It’s recognized that with the economic problems still being worked out globally, great improvement ideas are on hold because money is so hard to obtain.

An approach that many feel can change this is the concept of doing a down scaled pilot type improvement program in place of a site-wide initiative. Consider which part of the plant is currently making the most profit today. Now with that said, where in that manufacturing process are the greatest reliability oriented problems taking place? If you were able to just focus on that part of the process, and you implement a comprehensive improvement plan for it, you can start to see financial benefit in weeks, yes weeks, not months or years. Those savings can now allow you to make visable not only the worth of what your doing, but the timeliness of the savings contributing to good ole cash flow for the company. As your initiative gains traction so will its visability grow and management support starts to increase with amazing speed. After all, IT’S ALL ABOUT MONEY!

May 12th, 2009      Strategy & Leadership   Leave a Comment »

Reliability-Time based maintenance isn’t the answer.

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

As I have been talking to folks all around North America, I continue to be surprised at how many think that because they’re going to or improving their time based maintenance programs, that they are being proactice in driving reliability in their organizations. True, time based maintenance can help, but it’s only a very small part of what it takes to establish a proactive initiative.

The fundamental base for proactive maintenance requires the ability to first determine data points that should be observed, and second to monitor these thousands of condition based data points so as to become aware of the deterioration of component health prior to reaching a state of failure. It should also be noted that a state of failure is defined as when the component can no longer provide what is needed from it, not when it stops functioning all together.

The real trick is to determine which failures can best be detected via condition based data, which can best be addressed through time based maintenance, and which failures are best addressed by allowing them to occur (run to failure). I would submit that RCM and MTA are two very key approaches to help an organization work through and determine how best to structure their reliability improvement program. Time based maintenance alone just won’t get you there.  Good luck.

April 29th, 2009      Strategy & Leadership   Leave a Comment »

If Reliability is so important-Who owns it?

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

In todays world there are still many organizations that believe reliability and all it’s associated with should be owned and driven by the maintenance organization. I would offer that this approach is no longer valid and needs to be rethought as a critical part of a companies improvement strategy.

Reliability needs to be owned in partnership between operations and maintenance with heavy involvement from all other support groups such as engineering, safety, environmental and HR. The simple truth is that operators and maintainers working closely together are the folks most knowledgeable about how a piece of equipment should be operating. It then stands to reason that these are the individuals who are most apt to know when something is starting to go astray. By establishing a true partnership between these two groups and having the asset’s performance owned at the shop floor by both, that the real benefits of improving asset performance can start to be realized.

Management can’t truely drive reliability in todays world and probably couldn’t for many years now. The key is, and will continue to be, having shop floor folks from both areas, operations and maintenance, own and steer the reliabilty improvement efforts with the support of management and the other key resources located at the plant site.

When you think about it, isn’t that what would really make everyone’s life easier?

April 16th, 2009      Strategy & Leadership   Leave a Comment »

Reliability-Is now the time to go for it?

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

As many of us ponder on the downturned economy and it’s impact on our respective companies, the thought of funding reliability improvement seems way out into the future at best. In reality, now that profits are thin and the pressure is on everyone to cut costs, wouldn’t you think that the savings to be gained via improved asset performance is an important goal to go after today? I believe that all too many senior executives really don’t appreciate the value that improving reliability can bring to their bottom lines and it can start to happen now. The responsibility falls on each of us to understand the value proposition and communicate it to the right folks in our respective organizations. Many senior folks have grown to accept that asset failure is going to be a part of life no matter what and we know that this just isn’t true. The entire concept of operations and maintenance folks working together to drive up asset performance is exactly what is needed and it’s needed NOW. As we evolve to organizations of fewer people, we just don’t have the ability to continue being good fire fighters. If we can explain the benefits to improved reliability up the management chain and show them the collective benefits to be had, how can they not offer their support. I would propose that each of us ‘go for it and do it NOW’. Good luck!

April 9th, 2009      Strategy & Leadership   Leave a Comment »

Why is Reliability so hard to get support for?

Friday, March 20th, 2009

As I’ve discussed reliability with many folks around North America, I continue to hear about the difficulty in getting buy-in for a healthy, aggressive reliability program to be put in place. So if it’s so important, why does that happen? The trick continues to be getting senior management to understand what reliability is and what it can do for bottom line corporate performance.

Since it’s not easy to get the ear of senior folks much of the time, there is another way to consider going about this.

If you can identlfy an asset or process in your area of responsibility that fails a lot and matters a lot when it fails, might that be a great place to try a pilot. If it is truely a problem area, and given you and the team you work with can make a significant difference in how it’s performing, it’s got to receive serious attention. Once you’ve achieved that, the natural question asked is “what made such a difference”? There lies your opportunity to show how your team made this happen. The fact that it was a team effort, proven successful and not too hard to accomplish has got to start getting the attention of many others in your organization. What better way to get a program to take hold then to show success and value for all to see.

Give it a try, it just might make a ‘big’ difference.

March 20th, 2009      Strategy & Leadership   Leave a Comment »

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