Maintenance in reliability: engineering for a life cycle.

IMAGINE A CORPORATION FIGHTING AN UPHILL BATTLE to survive in the face of growing foreign competition, an aging work force, and other internal and external issues that seem designed to defeat long-term survival. The CEO decides to focus on reliability because maintenance is the largest controllable cost in the organization and without sound asset reliability, losses multiply in many areas. Over a two-year period, a dedicated team of more than 50 key employees researched the world's best maintenance organizations, assimilating the "best practices" they found, and implemented them in a disciplined, structured environment. At the end of the two years, reliability was noticeably better, maintenance costs were marginally lower, but the company's competitive position was relatively the same. Why?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The ultimate goal of maintenance is to provide optimal reliability that meets the business needs of the company, where reliability is defined as the probability or duration of failure-free performance under predefined conditions. Too many maintenance professionals are intimidated by the word reliability because they associate reliability with reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) and are unclear on what it actually means. As a result, too many companies focus on quickly fixing assets or processes that have already failed, rather than ensuring reliability and avoiding failures.

What this company, and a growing number of others, finally recognized is that maintenance is not the sole reason for high costs and poor reliability; it's just the visual result. In addition, maintenance cannot operate in a vacuum. Its success is dependent on engineering, procurement, operations, human resources, and other functional groups. If these functions fail to adhere consistently to best practices and all functions are fully integrated into an effective team, the facility will exhibit reduced reliability in the form of downtime, quality losses, late deliveries, and, above all, excessively high operating costs.

Corporations that truly understand reliability have the best performing plants. Common characteristics of a reliability-focused organization include the following:

* Their primary goal is optimal asset health and optimal total cost of ownership.

* The focus is on standard work processes (SWP) that stabilize the way the work force performs day-to-day activities.

* They measure the effectiveness of each step in the process and, only then, the efficiency of execution.

* All business decisions are data-driven and free of personalities or artificial pressures.

Reliability is simply the ability of an asset, production system, or work process to perform a predefined function under a defined set of conditions for a stated period of time. In other words, each of the assets and production systems that comprise the manufacturing process are designed, operated, and maintained in a manner that permits stable, reliable operations. This definition implies that the work processes that are used to design, operate, and maintain the assets are also stable and support reliability.

Recently, my team had the opportunity to evaluate the maintenance effectiveness of a company that manufactures products for the telecommunications industry. This company was committed to achieving world-class performance from its maintenance organization and made great progress in that direction. During our evaluation of the maintenance organization, we discovered that the average equipment utilization in the plant was less than 32 percent of the plant's installed capacity. None of the reasons for this poor utilization were maintenance-related. Instead, the reasons for poor utilization were (1) the failure of the sales function to provide sufficient volume, and (2) the failure of production planning to achieve effective scheduling for the production process. This raises an important question. Does it do any good to have a world-class maintenance organization without a comparable production department? In any production or manufacturing plant, capacity is of the highest importance.

Without acceptable capacity levels, none of the other indices of performance can be achieved. This is especially true of profitability. Maximum, first-time-through capacity must be the primary focus. Without world-class production, it simply does not matter how well or how poorly the maintenance organization performs. World-class performance from production or manufacturing is critical to both short- and long-term survival of all corporations. Production must effectively use the installed capacity or the plant cannot achieve acceptable performance levels.

Who has the primary responsibility for effective equipment utilization? Obviously, the production function is charged with the responsibility of planning and scheduling the processing of incoming orders in order to achieve the best use of the plant's installed capacity. However, production cannot schedule orders that do not exist. Therefore, the primary responsibility must reside with the sales and marketing function. If we assume that sales volume, delivery schedules, and adequate lot sizes are provided by the sales function, then the responsibility shifts to production. Production must then convert these orders in the most effective and efficient manner.

As is the case in other functional groups, there are specific criteria that must be followed to achieve world-class production performance.

Planning

Planning seems to be a forgotten art in many corporations, but it is absolutely essential. There are two types of planning that are required for world-class production performance: business and production. Successful companies are in an almost constant business planning process. They maintain a rolling five-year strategic plan and a detailed one-year plan. The strategic or five-year plan provides the long-term vision of the corporation and establishes the foundation for a viable continuous improvement program. It also provides a long-term view of the anticipated production requirement, both in standard and new products. In addition, the long-term plan projects the need for process upgrades, modifications, and additional systems.

In the case of production planning, the process must balance the flow of incoming orders and backlog to assure maximum utilization of resources. This includes both the installed systems and the manpower that is required to operate them. Few plants have an effective planning and scheduling function. In part, this is caused by the inability of the sales function to provide accurate projections or forecasts that would permit production to plan ahead.

Most production planning functions simply schedule production without any consideration of equipment utilization or even incurred production costs. Many functions are staffed by data entry clerks who simply log-in orders as they are received and add them to the backlog schedule.

Operating procedures and practices

When is the last time your plant reviewed or updated its standard operating procedures? As part of our normal evaluation process, we validate the procedures that plant personnel should use to operate and maintain plant systems. In most cases, their procedures are out-dated or obsolete. Generally, this is the result of modifications to the systems over time, but in some cases is simply caused by the company's failure to develop valid procedures.

Valid operating procedures are an absolute requirement of world-class performance. Every machine, system, and piece of equipment in your plant was designed to perform a specific task or range of tasks.

Even in those plants where procedures are valid and current, the operators rarely follow them. The actual operating practices that are used in most plants have absolutely no relationship to the operating envelope or best practices. Instead, they are the result of bad habits that have evolved over years of operation. In part, this is caused by the training methods that many plants use. Instead of providing formal training for new operators, these plants simply team a new operator with one who has been around for a while. The incumbent operator shows the trainee how he or she runs the process. If the incumbent operator had been properly trained, this approach might work, but unfortunately he was trained the same way.

Most operator training consists of showing a trainee which buttons to push and perhaps a sequence of when to push them. As a result, the operator has absolutely no understanding of the cause-effect relationship of his or her actions. Operators must understand the dynamics of the machine or process that they control.

Several years ago, we were asked to resolve a chronic boiler-tube leakage problem in a 1,000-megawatt, supercritical power plant. During a brief meeting with the utility's general manager, he started bragging about how the plant could go from cold shutdown to fully on-line three times faster than the boiler's design specifications recommended. In other words, the operators ramped up the temperature in the boiler three times faster than the recommended heat-up cycle. Why do you think the boiler tubes ruptured?

Answer: The thermal shock caused by the accelerated ramp rate was the root cause.

Operating procedures are written for a reason. They provide the only method that will provide optimum performance, maximum yield, highest product quality, and best life cycle cost from the production system.

Symbiotic relationships