Uptime: PDCA Drives Parts Management

Learning about maintenance excellence and deploying maintenance best practices are among our top goals in the quest for equipment- and process-reliability improvement. But there is a huge gap—let’s call it a chasm—between learning and deploying. We can learn much from those who have preceded us.

I recently attended the annual meeting of the Maintenance Excellence Roundtable (MER), hosted by Syngenta, a Switzerland-based agrichemical firm, in St. Gabriel, LA. The MER is an invitation-only group of plant maintenance and reliability leaders whose facilities have demonstrated exceptional, sustained performance in maintenance best practices and improved reliability. The group was formed in the 1990s to help member companies learn from each other’s experiences. Each year a different member company hosts the annual meeting, which includes presentations from each member company and plant tours that highlight maintenance best practices in action.

This year’s event featured presentations from Syngenta Crop Protection, Honeywell, Aera Energy, FMC, 3M, DuPont, and Johnsonville Sausage. Each was designed to share specific insights from their maintenance and reliability improvement journeys. The group is small enough to allow discussion and more in-depth probing of these first-hand experiences, an invaluable takeaway for participants. This month, I’ll share one of the presentations that demonstrated maintenance best-practice deployment with a strategic focus.

Use of the PDCA/scientific method system by the Storeroom Materials Management Team at Syngenta’s St. Gabriel, LA, facility resulted in a major upgrade in performance.

Best-practice deployment

How do we decide where and how to improve maintenance: through a best-practices implementation project, a strategically focused deployment, or both?

Unfortunately, maintenance best-practices deployments often turn into long-term maintenance-improvement programs. In these cases, it’s not unusual for the program to rely on a single person to set the pace and maintain progress. This leader often must struggle to become a sustainable part of the organization’s culture while attempting to address specific business goals.

By contrast, a strategically focused deployment of maintenance best practices can assure that improvement efforts are aligned with business goals. Results of these efforts can be measured and quantified, and linked to specific measurable business-related indicators. The key is ownership, learning to follow a change process, and then changing old habits along the way. Using this method, sustainable results can be quickly achieved.

The PDCA/scientific method has significantly reduced Syngenta mechanic travel time to get materials for jobs, resulting in more productive wrench time.

PDCA and the scientific method

Students of the Total Quality movement from the 1980s or the lean tools that followed will recall Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s continuous-improvement cycle of Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA), based on the scientific method. Deming’s teaching in Japan after World War II led to the modern quality-control movement that emphasizes the scientific method. This PDCA/scientific-method process was noted as the foundation of the Toyota Production System, Total Productive Maintenance, and Six-Sigma Quality. Variations have included PDSA (study) and PDCA (adjust).

One of the MER presentations featured Syngenta’s use of the PDCA/scientific method for improving storeroom performance. However, their process didn’t start with PDCA. It began by forming and chartering a team to “improve the storeroom,” which led to weekly meetings and benchmarking other chemical companies, along with lots of frustration and floundering.

Once introduced to the PDCA/scientific method, however, the Storeroom Materials Management Team learned to focus on just one aspect—one challenge—at a time. The overly simplified goal of “improving storeroom performance” was too big, too broad, too involved, and would have encountered an unending list of obstacles to overcome.

The need for focused improvement

Using the PDCA/scientific method, the Storeroom Team’s focus became more specific. “We need to put the right materials and tools in the hands of the people doing the work,” said John Peltier, Syngenta’s director of plant maintenance at St. Gabriel, LA. The entire storeroom team, which included those who issue parts and materials, order parts, and coordinate outside repairs, began using the PDCA/scientific-method process. It called for defining:

• the current condition
• the target condition, with process steps, sequence, timeframe, and metrics
• the obstacles.

The target condition was to “have materials ready when the mechanics need them” as a part of the bigger maintenance-planning, scheduling, and work-execution processes already in place.

Each obstacle to the target condition was addressed separately and documented on PDCA cycle record sheets posted in the meeting room. One of the team’s process steps focused on kitting parts. These included:

• have kits ready when needed
• have a process for kitting and auditing
• visually manage the kitting process
• have a materials-needed/on-hand communication process.

The team then established metrics and recorded evidence on charts posted in the meeting room. These included:

• number of jobs kitted weekly, used and unused
• number of kits not used, including specific reasons
• kit requests received by plant area and communications method.

Improvement-process leadership

The PDCA/scientific-method process at Syngenta is achieving new results, changing attitudes and behaviors, and improving performance. Communication about job kits has improved greatly. Inaccurate part numbers and bills of materials have been updated. Mechanic travel time to get materials for the jobs has been significantly reduced. This has resulted in more productive wrench time. Improvement-process leadership played a key role in keeping the Storeroom Team focused.

One of the PDCA/scientific-method tools used by John Peltier is captured on a small tag that hangs on his I.D.-badge lanyard. It contains the following five coaching questions:

• What is the target condition?
• What is the actual condition now?
• What obstacles do you think are preventing you from reaching the target condition? Which one are you addressing now?
• What is your next step (next experiment)? What do you expect?
• When can we go see…?

By asking team members what the target condition is, leadership can keep the improvement team focused on the specific-improvement experiments, and prevent the scope-creep that often occurs in team projects.

What the St. Gabriel Syngenta plant is doing to improve maintenance performance is on target. By following a focused improvement strategy and consistently using PDCA/scientific-method procedures, the improvement team’s ownership of the process is growing, their internal customers and partners are experiencing the benefits, and the business results are visible. This helps avoid implementation of widespread continuous-improvement projects that can outstrip resources and leadership.

Many thanks to the Maintenance Excellence Roundtable for allowing me to learn first-hand about this group’s ongoing pursuit of maintenance excellence. Thanks also to the Syngenta Storeroom Materials Management Team (Brenda, Mike, Tammy, Keith, and Stacy): Keep on truckin’! You are headed in the right direction.