Terry Wireman's Blog

PM Cancellation is not a Crime!

The last few blogs, I have been stressing the importance of preventive maintenance (PM) compliance.  Yet, companies still try to find ways around the necessary “stick to the schedule” for a PM program.

 The PMs that are rescheduled based on last completed date are PMs that make it easy for individuals to skip PMs without affecting their PM compliance KPI.  However, this is a short sighted approach.

 What if a company would actually have a fixed PM schedule and adhere to it?  If a monthly PM becomes due and it can’t be completed, cancel it (most systems will write a cancellation record to the equipment history file), and let the system produce the next month’s PM task. 

 Now, when there is an equipment failure, it is very easy to see that I completed the PM in Jan – missed February – completed March – Missed April – Missed May and then had an equipment failure at the start of June.  So my PM completion rate is at 40%. 

 Now when the maintenance/ reliability engineer reviews the equipment failure for a root cause, they have some data to work with.  When they see that the PM program, which was designed to eliminate this failure mode, only has a 40% completion rate, they can derive the proper solution.  It will likely be to improve PM compliance.

 Also, when PMs are cancelled, there should be a reason code as to why the PM was cancelled – Operations would not release the equipment, insufficient maintenance resources, excessive reactive work, etc.  This will allow the proper solution to the PM compliance problem to be recognized and implemented.

 Preventive maintenance programs are not that difficult to design – However, they can be difficult to execute.  The real goal should be to improve equipment performance, not meet a preventive maintenance KPI goal.

PM Execution - The Weak Link

Preventive Maintenance (PM) programs fail due to the lack of execution of the PM tasks at the proper frequency. While there are many ways to eliminate unnecessary PM tasks, such as PDM tools and RCM techniques, there are still PM tasks that must be accomplished by the maintenance and operations organization. Why is it that these PMs are not executed properly? It is due to not having the proper schedule and properly utilizing the available resources.

While it is true that most organization will start out properly, they eventually slip into poor practices that lead to a failure to execute the PM program. For example, consider the approach of load balancing the PM program. This is a technique that adjusts the schedule of the PM program so that almost the same level of resources are required each scheduling period (weekly). For example, for the next 52 weeks, 2 mechanics will spend 40 hours performing PMs, which will keep the program in compliance. The same can be done for other crafts (electrical) or perhaps it is a multi-skilled organization and the demand is not by craft, but rather by area. Once the schedule and resources are balanced, the PM program is ready to begin.

However, other demands develop for the PM resources, such as breakdowns or very high priority work. The PM resources are diverted from their schedule (a failure to prioritize and execute) and some PMs are not completed on time. This leads to the PM schedule being "slipped". If the PMs are re-scheduled based on last completion date, the balanced schedule now becomes unbalanced. This leads to a high number of PM resources being required one week and virtually none required in other weeks. This unbalanced situation will lead to further degradation of the PM compliance, since the PM resources are now diverted to other tasks on their "light" week. Soon the other tasks take priority over the PM work, even when there are "heavy" PM work loads during the week. This creates even further non-compliance of the PM program, which leads to a high percentage of reactive work. This is a downward "death spiral" leading to failure of the PM program.

How can this be stopped? Simply stated, the PM work must be given priority over all other work. Unless it is completed as scheduled, the PM program will slip and start into the "death spiral". Once it starts into the "death spiral", it is difficult to stop. Dedicated PM resources and a balanced PM schedule are required to stay in compliance. How does one solve the problem with PMs being re-scheduled based on last completion date?

This will be the topic for the next blog…

PM Execution – The Reason PM Programs Fail

You can visit almost any company and they will tell you that they have a Preventive Maintenance (PM) program.  They may even have the documents and a proposed schedule.  Yet, when you look at their work activity distribution, they are performing mostly reactive, unscheduled work.  In addition, when you tour the plant, looking at the equipment, it is in poor condition, showing the results of the neglect of the PM basics. 

Why is there this disconnect between what an organization says it is doing compared to the activities it is actually performing?  There are two basic reasons.  The first is that those performing the work do not know the maintenance basics.  When performing a PM inspection or service, they do not recognize out of tolerance conditions.  For example, this is a common line on a PM inspection:  “Check the motor to see if it is hot”.  Now it becomes the opinion of the one performing the PM as to what is “hot”.  Is hot 104 degrees F?  Is it 130 degrees F?  Is hot 180 degrees F?  Also, how do they measure the temperature?  Do they have hand help thermographic equipment?  Is there a thermometer on the measuring point?  The list of these types of omissions in a PM program would be almost endless.

Secondly, the more reactive a maintenance organization becomes, the more difficult it is to perform PMs.  The labor resources are consumed by the reactive work with little time to perform the PMs.  With the limited time available, the individual performing the PM inspection or service, will give it a cursory attempt, while waiting for the next breakdown.  However, the effectiveness will be limited, leading to further breakdowns, leading to even poorer PMs being performed, leading to more breakdowns, leading to etc., etc.,.

How can the execution of PM programs be improved, thus eliminating these problems?  Next blog…

 

The Myth of “Maintenance-Induced” Failures

Much has been said about “maintenance-induced” failures in the media lately.  However, just what is a maintenance-induced failure?  It has been explained that this type of failure occurs when a maintenance technician is doing an intrusive inspection or service on a piece of equipment and induces or causes a failure.  This is due to the maintenance technician putting the piece of equipment back together incorrectly and it fails shortly after being put back in service.

So let’s stop and consider this scenario.  If take my automobile into the repair shop and have the brakes checked, the auto technician does a partial disassembly of the car to see the brakes properly and determine their actual condition.  Do I worry about a “auto-technician” induced failure to my brakes?  Likely not.  If I take my watch to a jewelry store to be cleaned (yes, not all of us have digital watches), do I worry about a “jewelry technician” induced failure with my watch?

Those are simple examples, so let’s use some additional complicated ones.  Have you ever had a transmission fail in your automobile?  Did you replace it with a new transmission or a rebuilt one?   For most of us, the answer will be “a rebuilt one”. Why?  Because the new one is much more expensive!  Did we worry about a “transmission technician” induced failure? 

Likewise, did anyone ever have an automobile engine fail?  Did you have it rebuilt? Did you buy a different rebuilt engine?  Did you buy a new engine?  Again, the answer will probably be the rebuilt engine.  Why, because a new one will cost a lot more.  Did you worry about a “technician induced” failure in the rebuilt engine?  The answer is no.

Now in these scenarios (and many others) we trust the person who performed the “maintenance” on the inspected and rebuilt components.  Why don’t we do that in our plants or facilities?  Why do we allow equipment to run to failure or require very expensive technology to monitor when we could perform good manual inspections and services and achieve the same goal?  It is due to the fact that we do not trust the skills of our current technicians.

Why don’t we train our technicians to the level of proficiency so that we can send them out to do a preventive maintenance inspection and/or service on our equipment and be confident there will be no “Maintenance-Induced” failures? 

More next week…

Progress – Slow and Steady –

A site that should be periodically visited by all maintenance and reliability professionals is http://www.uspc251tag.org   This site is where you can get the latest news on the proposed ISO-55000 standards. 

Most companies have heard about the PAS-55 standard- which is the UK’s Publically Available Standard for asset management.  The proposed ISO-55000 standard is the first attempt to have an asset management standard. 

Why is this important?  Most companies are evaluated by their investors, based on their profit compared to the investment in the assets.  Properly managed assets will help companies lower the denominator in this calculation.  So the company’s financial standing  and perception on Wall Street can be impacted. 

In addition, a company’s safety, environmental, and quality process can all be impacted by well-managed or poorly managed assets.  Since assets are key to business performance, wouldn’t it be beneficial to have standard processes?  Why not stop by the above web site and check out what is going on in this area?  Better yet, why not get involved – Information on how to be involved is also on this site.  You might find it rewarding, both for you and your company.

English 101 and Maintenance

A grammar website (http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/adjectives.htm) offers this information on adjectives:

Adjectives are words that describe or modify another person or thing in the sentence. Examples are:

the tall professor

a solid commitment

a six-year-old child

the unhappiest, richest man

  Now, to avoid having everyone go to sleep reading this blog (like I used to do in English class), let’s get to the maintenance application.  Let’s take the example of “reliability-centered maintenance”.  The noun in the sentence would be “maintenance”.  The adjective that describes or modifies “maintenance” is “reliability-centered”.  So we end up with a phrase that really means maintenance that is centered on reliability.

 As I have discussed in a previous blog, reliability is a design function.  This means that when we commission the equipment, we begin the operation and maintenance phase of the equipment’s life cycle.  The reliability and maintainability are already specified in the design of the equipment.  Why is this important? 

 It is important because companies today are wasting considerable resources trying to have their maintenance departments that are “centered on reliability” make up for design flaws that impact their equipment performance.  Since the problems are design flaws, they cannot be corrected by typical maintenance tools and techniques. 

 One author stated we need to “…Reverse the present trend of spending over 90% of the reliability, maintainability, and quality costs in industry to correct reliability, maintainability, and design inadequacies and defects after they have occurred, while spending less that 10% to design and make them correctly in the first place”. 

 So while we may argue that we need maintenance that focuses on making our equipment more reliable (maintenance centered on reliability), perhaps what we really need is true design reliability engineers that give us better assets to maintain in the first place.

 More on the author mentioned above and his focus on Maintainability, Availability and Operational readiness next week…

 

Things You Learn on Airplanes

Since the first of this year, I have observed at least a dozen incidents where passengers were e-mailing, making phone calls, or using electronic devices during take-offs and landings on airplanes.  If you speak up and remind them that this is against FAA regulations, you are told to mind your own business (the most polite thing that was said) or you may be told things that are basically unprintable.  These infractions are not the fault of the flight attendants, since the passengers are deliberately hiding their electronic usage from the flight attendants.  The passengers are doing this despite the fact that if caught by an FAA representative, they will be fined $1,000.00.  It must be that they feel they are above the law or that their chance of actually being caught is negligible.

Why does this matter?  For the most part the observed offenders appear to be business professionals (mid 40’s to mid 60’s).  If they are business managers, consider how this attitude could carry over to their business activities.  What if they were a plant manager?  A corporate executive?  A front line manager?  Suppose they were faced with an inconvenience due to an OSHA, EPA, FDA, or NRC regulation?  Would they have the same attitude that they display on an airplane?  Would they disregard the regulations thereby threatening their employees with injury or death because it is not likely to happen?  Would they feel that it won’t matter because nothing will happen just this once? 

How many incidents do we hear about in the news, read about in the paper, or see in the Federal Register where individuals have violated written regulations (or even accepted Best Practices) to the detriment of their companies or employees? 

It would be interesting as part of the hiring process if key job candidates would have to travel with some company executives for a week. Maybe they would learn how their executives would behave in their companies.  Maybe they would re-think whether or not they wanted to be a part of a company with negligent leadership. 

Do You Value Maintenance?

One dictionary defines value as “relative worth, merit, or importance”.  How do most organizations view maintenance?  Most will use terms such as “necessary evil”, “expense” or “costly”.  Are these terms really the right way to view maintenance?  What is the “relative worth, merit, or importance” of the maintenance function for an organization?

First everyone needs to realize that maintenance is a defined component in the life cycle of any asset, whether it is a piece of equipment or a building.  The maintenance costs are predictable and controllable.  They are also determined (up to as much as 95%) during the design phase of the asset life cycle.   

When an organization complains that their maintenance costs are too high, do they expect the maintenance organization to correct problems that are actually part of the equipment’s design specification?  Is that what they mean to “reduce” maintenance costs?  For organizations to arbitrarily reduce their maintenance budget by 10% shows they truly do not understand the maintenance function, let alone really value it.

The Organizational Fog…

As companies continue to react to the rise and fall of their respective market demands, they “tinker” with their organizations trying to figure out how to “lean” their staffing, when in most cases they are already “anemic”.  They continue to ask their employees to “do more with less”.  This is especially evident with the maintenance organization.  Companies will try to make the supervisors plan – or they try to make the planners supervise.  They try to make the maintenance engineers into reliability engineers or visa versa.

Instead of carefully examining the roles and responsibilities, they just feel they can plug and play without understanding the true responsibility of a job role and the true qualifications of someone in the role or a candidate for the role.  Then managers wonder why their organizations are dysfunctional.

Why can’t we go back to basics and understand what objectives we expect our organizations to achieve, design the roles and responsibilities to achieve the goals and objectives, and then fill the job roles with the personnel who (a) have the proper skills or (b) provide training to existing employees so they can properly function in the job roles? 

The real reason we can’t?  Most managers responsible for making these decisions do not truly understand the maintenance/ reliability/ asset management (you can pick) business sufficiently enough to properly staff it.

A Harvard Business Review article (12/07 page 72) said “A Customer… they can rarely tell you whether they need or want a product that they have never seen or imagined”.  This is also true of most managers and proactive maintenance organizations.  It is hard for them to say they want one – when they have never seen one.  It is even harder if they have never imagined what it would be like to have one of their own. 

If they ever see a proactive maintenance/ reliability/ asset management organization or even imagined what having one would be like – maybe we could cut through the “Organizational Fog”…

Organizational Design – Why is it so Difficult

There has been an interesting discussion on an internet site about the correct positioning of a reliability engineer in the company’s organization.  While not being critical of the opinions posted on the site, the real question has to start with understanding the responsibilities of the reliability engineer. 

In my blogs last year, I discussed the roles of the reliability, project, and maintenance engineers.  We need to consider the role each of these highly qualified and necessary individuals in the life cycle of any corporate assets.  If the life cycle of assets encompasses the following phases:

1. Specify/ Design
2. Procure/ Build/ Install
3. Operate/ Maintain
4. Decommission/ Dispose

Then, on what phases do the various engineers’ roles focus?

1. Would not the reliability engineer focus on the specify/ design of the equipment?
2. Would not the project engineer focus on the Procure/ Build/ Install phase?
3. Would not the maintenance engineer focus on the operate/ maintain phase?

 Why do we keep blurring the lines in these areas of responsibilities?  This will be the topic of next week’s blog.