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 for improving
operations and reducing costs (and the risk of costs from potential failures)
by changing 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, 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 of these programs
requires sophistication, education, training, and discipline in the management
ranks to drive successful programs as ethical statements of how we plan to do
business. The ethical statements require
insight and motivation for achieving excellent 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 recognizing that every failure has a
cost consequence both internal to the organization and external to the
customers who purchase and use the products produced.
Please note the above word 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.
Indoctrination by the top-level management
team for lower levels in the organization involves personal participation. Indoctrination cannot be off-loaded/delegated
to others in the organization for effectively transmitting the message as:
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, and
Reliability Departments do not, on their own, produce a failure
free process.
Each of the department controls the 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 stage. 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 has value for the 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 the organization
is skillful enough to expect helping hands to willingly take the initiative,
without direction, for productive 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, (i.e., invested by management with authority to take action)
and
Enabled
means trained and drilled for proficiency using best practices that are
continuously improved by feedback for the working teams (i.e., turned-on for
action rather than disabled and denied action).
Empowered and enabled does not mean doing
the minimum effort to reach the 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. The book relates the history of why
Management gets what management wants—if
the programs are properly configured with roles and responsibilities clearly
defined and expectations stated in writing.
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 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.
Management says, yes, we believe in
reliability programs but just get this _____ (you supply the equipment name)
repaired faster! Management fails to
observe a cross-communication as words and actions that do not match; this is
quickly interpreted by the organization because the 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 silliness will soon disappear (along with the
initiators of the reliability program) and 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 the program begins
with acquisition of a newer and more complex CMMS system that requires a large
capital expenditure and extensive training for everyone in the operations
because 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. Thus
previous failure history is judged as worthless because the reliability team
has not used the data to solve problems.
A red dot has now been painted on the head of the CMMS team so that 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 as “Continuous
improvement is better than postponed perfection”!)
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How to
Make Reliability Programs Successful:
Since management-driven reliability
programs are usually successful, how do you take non-management-driven programs
and make them successful? Here are some
bullet points to consider for the reliability strike force:
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)!
2.
Build a Pareto
distribution of losses (also including the risks for potential losses),
which is the sum of maintenance costs and lost margin money 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.”
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—say 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 program is not paying its way, kill it and disband the
reliability organization. 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 CMSS system. And if the CMSS is not adequate, argue why
better data is needed for technical solutions to problems along with high
fidelity conversions of old data into the new CMSS system.
8.
Based on the financial successes, sell management on
why a formal reliability program (coming from management) is to their advantage
to change the culture in the plant from failure accepting 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 assets.
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.
12. Continue to justify and sell the reliability program as a
portion of the maintenance work process and the design work process for first
quartile operation with a small cost of
unreliability compared to peer producers.
13. Recognize the reliability program is about selling improvement
programs, not simply talking 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 rather than doing).
Comments:
Refer to the caveats on the Problem
of the Month Page about the limitations of the following solution.
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