Why do some reliability programs succeed? Why do other reliability programs fail? How do you make reliability programs
successful? Key elements
characterize each case.
Attributes
of Successful Reliability Programs:
Successful reliability programs begin as
top-down management-driven programs. The
programs improve operations and reduce costs (and the risk of costs from
potential failures such as for safety issues).
Successful reliability programs change the
business culture to abhor failures which cause long-term chaos and extra
costs. Failure-free business programs
have similar statements:
Safety—We will
operate in an accident-free environment,
Quality—We will ship defect-free
products,
Environmental—We will operate without spills or releases to the
environment for failure-free results, and
Reliability—We will design and
build an economical and failure-free manufacturing process that will operate
for 5 years between planned turnarounds.
Failure-free cultures must be created, top
down, to accept failure-free programs as the right thing to do to enhance
long-term profits as a way of life for the organization. Management communicates their desires in each
of these areas with a policy
statement for clarity and effectiveness.
None of these failure-free programs are
altruistic, “do-good” programs. The
programs are not eye washes for looking good but accepting chaos of
failures. Each program requires sophistication,
education, training, and discipline in the management ranks to drive successful
programs as ethical statements of how we plan to do business. Discipline
is used in the spirit of: to train, direct, and mold. Discipline
is not used in the spirit of: to beat up, intimidate, berate, belittle, or
degrade.
The ethical, failure-free statements
require insight and motivation for achieving excellent (failure-free) results
by motivating the entire organization to eliminate failures, and the risk of
failures, so as to operate for the lowest long-term cost of ownership. Recognize that every failure has a cost
consequence and alternatives. Cost
consequences apply internally to the organization and externally to the
customers who purchase and use the products produced.
The top-level management team must
indoctrinate lower management levels in the organization to achieve their
personal participation. Indoctrination
cannot be off-loaded/delegated to others in the organization for effectively
transmitting the failure-free message.
Safety Departments do not, on their
own, control safety results.
Quality Departments do not, on their
own, control product quality.
Environmental Departments do not, on
their own, control environmental results.
Reliability Departments do not, on their own, produce a failure
free process.
The system depends upon management teamwork
to achieve failure-free results.
Management is the teamwork coach to accomplish the desired failure-free
results.
Each of the above departments control results
in the same manner as the weatherman controls the weather! Each of the departments provides knowledge,
scorekeeping, and motivation for the organization to accomplish the collective
results by individual participation and teamwork. Favorable results are obtained by the team
preventing failures at the formative stages.
Favorable results are not achieved by quickly cleaning up the blood and
guts of failures. Failure-free environments
accomplish favorable results by doing the job right the first time at the
lowest tradeoff cost.
Management
values organizational results of the team to achieve failure-free
environments. Management recognizes that
discrepancies (small failures) will occur at every step of the process, and
skillful organizations expect helping hands to willingly take the initiative,
without individual direction, for productive failure-free results rather than
waiting for specific management instructions.
This means individuals must be empowered
and enabled to take corrective
action for good team effort where all work for the lowest long-term cost of
ownership by abhorring failures. Please
note:
Empowered means management authorizes
individual initiative and experience to be used continuously in an effective
and timely manner. Management must
invest individuals in the organization with authority to take action.
Enabled
means trained and drilled for proficiency using best practices that are
continuously improved by feedback for the working teams. Management must turn-on the organization for
action rather than disabling and denying positive action.
Empowered and enabled does not mean contributing a minimal effort to reach the lowest
acceptable lowest proficiency levels! To
gain a historical and documented sense of empowerment and enablement, read the
book To
Rule The Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern
World by Arthur Herman, ISBN: 0-06-053424-9. This book relates the history of why
The English Navy, when in harm’s way, fired
two to three times more often with higher precision than their
adversaries. Why? The English Navy drilled continuously every
day—sailors and officers knew the details of many jobs.
Lack of individual initiative, training,
and teamwork among
Captured French, Spanish, and Dutch
officers, when brought aboard English ships, were amazed at how silently
English sailing ships of the line operated under teamwork by empowered and
enabled sailors and officers during battle!
The opponents’ ships had pandemonium for similar results at a slower
pace (that’s the reason the English captured their opponents as they seized
their ships and put the defeated officers directly under the gaze of English
conquerors).
Bottom line: English Navy management (officers) gave up
many prerogatives of directing the work force (sailors) to achieve superior
results by being on the firing line during action. The English Naval officers helped the team
(no Us vs. Them situations existed in battle) to
achieve superior results. This meant
officers were required to know and perform mundane details with great
proficiency (e.g., show me don’t tell me!).
This provides a strong message for management today. Management cannot learn detailed jobs, to
helpfully guide the organization, in an environment of continual chaos of
rotations and turnovers on 12 month to 2 year changes of command. You need seasoned managers and not slightly
seared managers to gain constancy of purpose and work for a failure-free
organization to achieve good results the first time and every time.
Management gets what management wants. This means management driven programs must be
properly configured with roles and responsibilities clearly defined and
expectations stated in writing to empower
and enable the organization for
failure-free results from the many invisible hands of the workforce taking
positive corrective action.
Attributes
of Failed Reliability Programs:
Unsuccessful reliability programs begin as
bottom-up engineering programs for improving maintenance technical details and
hopefully making improvements for operations.
The push is for better maintenance technology without financial
justifications to carry the project forward.
Bottom up reliability improvement programs
are frequently lukewarmly endorsed by management. Management gives a wave of the hand and a sly
grin followed by an aside to other managers as if to say “Here we go again with
another gear-head approach to maintenance that will require us to spend more
money for no results.” In other asides,
management says, “I wonder what new book/magazine these guys have been reading
or which new consultant they have met?”
At this point, the ship has been torpedoed but not yet sunk as management
is not leading—it’s subversively following.
Management says, “Yes, we believe in
reliability programs but just get this equipment repaired faster!” Management fails to observe a dangerous
cross-communication as words and actions that do not match. This cross-communication is quickly
interpreted by the organization. The
bottom-up reliability program will be similar to other short-lived improvement
programs that have been demonstrated to be ineffective. The organization says, “Just wait a while and
this new silliness will soon disappear (along with the initiators of the
reliability program). Then we can go
back to doing business as usual without all of this difficult technical
detail.” In short, the organization has
just endorsed a silent, subversive attack against advocates for changing the
status quo.
Moving reliability programs upward as a
technical method of improving maintenance, is as effective as pushing a wet
rope. Maybe up to 10% to 20% of the
bottom-up approaches are successful. Quantification
of improvements is difficult to prove to the satisfaction of the skeptics, and
management is suspicious of the claimed results as changes in the status quo
are difficult to accept. The
organization says failures of equipment and processes are expected to occur,
and besides, the organization rewards fast repairs over preventing
failures. And by the way, how would you
show you’ve prevented failures?
The kiss of death for some reliability
programs begin with acquisition of a newer and more complex computerized
maintenance management system (CMMS).
The new CMMS requires a large capital expenditure and extensive training
for everyone in the operations. The bet
is the new CMMS system will save our tail feathers. Data from the old, “inferior” CMMS system is
not converted to the new, improved system because the data is “no good” and
unworthy of the conversion costs—this is a big mistake. The previous failure history is judged as
worthless because the reliability team has not used the data to solve problems
because they were never adequately trained.
A red dot has now been painted on the head of the CMMS team so, in time,
the organization will peck the team to death with a thousand small cuts.
Don’t get me wrong. I am for use of data from CMMS systems. I just don’t want to wait “forever” before
acquiring perfect data. We need to make
the best of the existing information. “Continuous improvement is better than
postponed perfection”! If you’ve got
the best CMMS system in the world and no one knows how to analyze the data,
you’re lost---software won’t save you, it’s the training and skills of the
people that will pull your chestnuts out of the fire! Having Excel on computers will not be
productive if you have not trained your people in how to use it, and it is most
effectively used by people with both mathematical and engineering skills.
Add to this chaos lack of management
knowledge of new tools for preventing failures.
Why prevent failures? Its simple,
failures cost money and we need to look for the most cost effective approach
(sometimes this may simply mean repairing the failure)! The management problem gets worse when
managers reject training initiatives to increase their knowledge of improvements
underway in similar organizations because management fails to read and study
new and more cost effective strategies.
The chaos gets worse with every new management change because what was
right before the management switch is now described as wrong because we’ve got
to “change” from the old failed course (sing this refrain every 1-2 years in
many organizations with revolving door managers).
Return to top
How to
Make Non-Management Driven Reliability Programs Successful:
How do you create non-management-driven
reliability programs that replicate succeses of
management-driven reliability programs?
Here are some bullet points to consider for the reliability strike force
to sell successful programs:
1.
Make the reliability program
money driven (not technology driven).
Use reliability
tools/technology to get to the money.
Sell the reliability program as all about the money and time (two
favorite subjects of management)!
Remember that safety issues are also about the probability of failure
multiplied by the cost consequences to get the money at risk.
2.
Build a $Pareto distribution
of losses (also including the risks for potential losses), which is the sum of
maintenance costs (usually small) and lost margin money (usually large in a
sold out process or zero in a non-sold out process where make-up time for
failures is available) from process failures.
3.
Forecast
failures into the future for the next 3 to 5 years based on past 5 to10
years of experience (gather data only on the top ten items) using Crow-AMSAA
reliability growth plots as a “show me, don’t just tell me the
situation.” Convert the forecasted
failures into a forecast of money that will be lost.
4.
Build the top ten work list based on
money. Discuss the details with
management. Gain concurrence that these
key problems need to be solved first before consideration of love affairs with
equipment or processes, and then monetize the love affairs for priority along
with the other economic issues.
5.
Based on the top ten work list, make a
hypothesis about when cusps can be put on the Crow-AMSAA plots and how much
gain can be achieved—state the
results in time and money. Project
the savings achieved by an active reliability program to reduce/eliminate
failures to the process/equipment.
Describe time/money with payback periods. Get acceptance by management that these key
issues need to be resolved and resources provided to produce the expected
results.
6.
Show progress quickly—months, not
years. Sum the financial results to
justify the reliability program in time/money.
If the reliability program is not paying its way, kill it and disband the
reliability organization for lack of effectiveness. If the program is succeeding, advertise the
results to management and press on for more savings very quickly.
7.
In the top items of the Pareto
distribution, use top-down fault
tree analysis tools to work on recurring problems and in the critical legs
of the fault tree perform failure
mode and effects analysis to ferret out the roots of the problem and
prevent failures from occurring using data from the CMMS system. And if the CMMS is not adequate, argue why
better data is needed for technical solutions to problems along with mandatory
high fidelity conversions of old data into the new CMMS system to preserve
historical failure details.
8.
Based on the financial successes, sell management on
why a formal reliability program (coming down from management) is to their
advantage to change the culture in the plant from failure acceptance to failure
prevention. Also, sell management
why they should issue a reliability
policy to communicate with the organization for achieving a failure-free
process.
9.
Enlarge the reliability program to include process
reliability for inclusion in the Pareto distributions for high ticket cost
issues.
10. Encourage separation of maintenance
engineers (tactical resources) from reliability
engineers (strategic resources) without increasing head counts for more
cost-effective utilization of human assets.
Expecting engineers to do both jobs only
results in the adrenalin driven maintenance engineering work.
11. Introduce into new projects the use of reliability
models for calculating availability, reliability, and the number of
expected failures in projects with design goals for each case based on failure
data acquired from operations data particularly from a Weibull database
of failures and repairs. Work for the
lowest long term cost of ownership.
12. Continue to justify and sell the reliability program as a
portion of both the maintenance work process and the design work process to
achieve first quartile operation with a small cost of
unreliability compared to peer producers.
13. Recognize the reliability program is about selling effective money driven improvement programs, not simply telling about technology. Successful reliability programs are about
saving money and improving operations (making favorable economic things
happen)—they are not about ponderous bureaucratic efforts (sitting and delaying
rather than doing).
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