Don’t Procrastinate, Innovate: Maintain to the Weakest Link, Part 2 — Weakness as Opportunity

The first installment of this two-part column (EP, May, 2015) explored weakness as a desired state. To recap, manufacturers leverage this type of weakness in equipment’s consumable-wear items by building in adjustability that helps ensure the reliability and integrity of an asset’s critical—and typically most expensive—component systems. In this concluding installment, we explore undesirable weak links related to issues of organizational culture (including knowledge and training) that affect the way operations and maintenance personnel behave in various situations. These behaviors can seriously affect a machine’s ability to perform efficiently and reliably.

Weakness as an undesired state

In his best-selling book Good to Great (2001, HarperCollins, New York), author Jim Collins describes a world-class organization as one that has consistently beaten the stock market by an average of seven times, for 15 consecutive years or more. He also identifies the three hallmarks of greatness responsible for converting corporate cultural weakness into strength—evident in all 10 companies highlighted in the book—as relational understanding, communication, and measurement.

Collins’ premise is applicable to the field of asset management: Those who seek to improve the effectiveness of a maintenance organization must identify and address weak links in its culture and team dynamics, along with weak links in the maintenance system and overall approach to managing assets.

Working with countless operations over the course of my career, one of the most frequently used excuses for poor maintenance practices and/or unplanned downtime events that I’ve encountered has been, “We’ve always done it that way!” When a plant-maintenance professional offers this explanation, it’s a good bet his/her site has seldom—if ever—seriously addressed best-practice asset-management strategies, processes, and procedures (perhaps for decades). This reflects an undesirable state of weakness in that effective solutions from the past may have become inadequate or detrimental in the years since. Imagine personnel attempting to maintain plant-equipment assets “the way we’ve always done it,” despite the site having added new shifts to run new production lines automated by new intelligent machinery systems capable of manufacturing new types of products for new and expanded markets at higher speeds than the facility’s old equipment ever could. It’s easy to pick out the weakness in this hypothetical, but not so far-fetched, example. Some of today’s operations, to varying degrees, are trying to run in a similar vein.

Eliminate the weakest links

The first step in eliminating weak links involves establishing and understanding the asset-management role within your organization and building relationships between the asset-management group (or maintenance department) and internal and external stakeholders. Doing so puts the asset-management group in a position of strength that allows it to:

• manage by common objectives, which can be used to set up service-level agreements with stakeholders
• measure and track activities for effectiveness.

This step is achieved by conducting an asset-management or maintenance-operation effectiveness review (MOER) using a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) approach to objectively and subjectively assess the site’s current and preferred/future states and build a MAP (management action plan) for eliminating cultural weakness issues based on a gap analysis of both states. In this review, it’s crucial to establish the importance of relationships between the operator, who interacts with an asset on a daily basis, and the maintainer, who interacts with an asset on a longer-term, occasional basis.

Historically, sites have suffered from a lack of communication and interaction between their operations and maintenance groups. This situation clearly reflects an undesired state of weakness: Operators, after all, represent a critical first-line of defense in the war on downtime. They instinctively know when machines are operating outside their “sweet spots” and, accordingly, can alert maintenance personnel of potential problems so they can take necessary corrective actions before the equipment fails.

Cultivating an effective relationship requires operations and maintenance personnel to work collaboratively to, among other things, develop solutions/procedures that let non- or semi–skilled operators and maintainers perform quick condition-based visual checks of equipment and determine if a machine indicates a go or no-go state. Implementing and following simple and relevant check and notification procedures for contacting and alerting appropriate personnel about no-go exceptions will let operations and maintenance work as a team and, accordingly, convert a weak link into a strength.

Filling critical jobs in industry, despite the expected loss and non-replacement of workers in the skilled trades over the coming decade, will require the remaining pool to work smarter. This very real risk is an example of another weak link. Organizations can mitigate it by reviewing the relevancy and efficiency of current workflows and processes (if they exist) and the quality of instruction sets or job plans. Fortunately, improved relationships and communications between operations and maintenance organizations and implementation of collaborative condition-based maintenance approaches will make it possible for sites to discard or replace many of their traditional preventive maintenance (PM) job plans.

All PM job plans in a plant’s asset-management system must be evaluated for redundancy, relevance, subjectivity, and value. The ensuing culling exercise can significantly reduce the amount of redundant planned work in a system and free-up labor resources to redeploy and work more efficiently on higher-value tasks.

A work-order system becomes a management system when its data are turned into meaningful reports that can be used to make informed management decisions. By defining the stakeholders and a set of measurable stakeholder objectives to achieve or sustain, maintenance has a baseline for developing meaningful reporting. These reporting requirements aid in determining relevant data that a work order needs to collect. This determination, in turn, influences the work-order design, completion process, and correct sort filters to set up in the asset-management software, thereby eliminating waste and other weak links in the asset-management system.

‘Own’ weakness

While a built-in value-based methodology will make it easier for an asset-management group or maintenance department to expose and eliminate process and procedural weaknesses through collaboration and training, organizations must first own up to them.

Think of your organization’s understanding and exploitation of its cultural weaknesses as a first-class ticket to greatness. Turning an undesirable state into an opportunity always starts with a group’s willingness to take a hard look at itself, call out the weakest links, and then firmly tell them “goodbye.”