The Reliability Of Everything Culture Improvement Awards

Efficient Plant magazine and the Univ. of Tennessee Reliability and Maintainability Center will recognize manufacturing-enterprise culture development and sustainability through the new Reliability of Everything Culture Improvement Awards program.

I’ve referenced in many articles and presentations the enormous importance of culture in attaining and sustaining top-quartile performance in reliability and maintainability (R&M) initiatives. A few facts and comments that stand out from that information include:

• You are seven times more likely to be successful in a large change effort when the people involved are properly engaged.

• If your workforce is engaged (three or more voluntary suggestions implemented per employee), data show that, on average, 36% higher throughput is achieved.

• Maturity of the reliability and maintainability process (implementing the best practices that enable top-quartile performance) is highly correlated with team culture (R2 = 0.73).

• Culture is what your employees do when they think you aren’t looking.

• Operator involvement in R&M has a significant positive impact on equipment availability and maintenance cost.

• Facilities with highly engaged employees (top quartile) were 14% better in OSHA Recordable Incident Rate and 35% better in maintenance costs (expressed as a percentage of sales) than operations in the lower three quartiles.

Yet, as we approach 2019, the biggest roadblock to R&M progress is still culture and these questions are still dominant topics of conversation:

• How do I change the mindset from reactive to proactive?

• What’s wrong with doing mostly time-based maintenance?

• Why is 75% of North America still not doing enough predictive/condition-based maintenance and root-cause analyses?

To help share success stories and “move the needle” on measureable results, the Univ. of Tennessee Reliability and Maintainability Center and Efficient Plant magazine are introducing The Reliability of Everything Culture Improvement Awards program, designed to recognize organizations that demonstrate measureable cultural growth and development.

Awards will be offered in three categories:

• Best Culture Startup (changing a challenging culture/difficult situation)

• Best Sustaining Culture (evidence of a consistent, top-quartile environment)

• Best Culture Innovation (unique solution to improve culture).

Overall, the awards will be based on three criteria:

• Measured improvement in R&M metrics (25%)
• Measured improvement in culture (50%)
• Documented journey/process used with lessons learned (25%).

The awards will be open for submissions in Jan. 2019. Details will be provided in the January issue of Efficient Plant, at efficientplantmag.com, and at the Univ. of Tennessee Reliability and Maintainability Center website, rmc.utk.edu. Finalists will be selected by a panel of judges and winners determined by a confirming site visit. (Finalists outside of North America will be handled on an individual basis.)

Winners will be announced in the Dec. 2019 issue of Efficient Plant and their stories told in feature articles in the first quarter of 2020.

An awards ceremony will be part of the 2020 MARCON Conference, held the first week of March 2020 at the Knoxville Convention Center.

I’m looking forward to reviewing the submissions and sharing the success stories, so we can all learn together. EP