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The Fundamentals
of Effective Improvement Management by Gil Sargent,
The Center for Advanced Management
Introduction
When
considering the effort to upgrade your current
maintenance program, it is important to understand the
roadblocks to success that you will most likely
encounter. Once you understand the barriers to
improvement, and can communicate using a common language
of phrases and terminology, you can begin the process of
identifying improvement opportunities, building
improvement action plans, and completing improvement
tasks that will, ultimately, improve performance.
Why Should We Change?
As
maintenance managers we sometimes ask ourselves, “We’re
the first ones here in the morning and the last ones to
leave at night. We bust our tails everyday trying to
keep things up and running, so why does everyone
constantly tells us we’re not doing good enough? We’re
already doing our best aren’t we?”
The truth is that we
are not doing as well as we could, or should, be doing,
and we never will be. The fact is we can always learn
more and there is always room to get better. Yet often
our stubborn resistance to others pressing us to improve
is born of the work ethic most of us as maintenance
managers have. However, we must come to the
understanding that motion does not equal work and effort
does not equal results. We can do better and we should
get busy finding out how.
In the October 2000
edition of Maintenance Technology Magazine, Robert
Wilson of Performance Consulting Associates stated the
following nationwide plant performance statistics:
·
“Thirty percent of newly overhauled
machines fail on startup.
·
An estimated one-third of the money spent
on preventative maintenance is wasted.
·
Sixty percent of premature bearing
failures are due to improper fitting, maintenance, and
handling.
·
…Average craft
productivity, measured through “wrench time” studies, is
typically in the 25 to 35 percent range. Productive
work is held up by time spent waiting on materials,
tools, instructions, and time spent traveling to the
job.”
Unless you have
recently commissioned an audit at your facility and your
score demonstrates performance above these marks, then
these statistics may show potential areas for
improvement at your facility, as well. The fact is,
every equipment fleet, plant, and facility cycles
through periods of elevated performance and through
periods of lower than expected performance. That is the
nature of the business we are in, however, we should
always strive to achieve the highest sustainable
performance levels possible. This level of performance
is known as your Optimal Sustainable Performance Level.
If higher performance
levels can be achieved, what reasons are there for
maintenance managers to resist improvement efforts?
Some resist because to admit that improvement efforts
are potentially beneficial may imply they are not
effective in their jobs, or are not working hard enough
to do their best in the first place. For others,
admitting to the need for improvement would mean
maintenance managers might have to step outside their
comfort zone. And most resist because they already have
a lot on their plates and are just too busy with what
they are currently working on to even consider adding
anything new.
In summary, we resist,
not because we don’t want to improve, but rather,
because it is simply more convenient for improvement
efforts to fail to materialize. We are comfortable with
what already exists.
To close our
Performance Gaps we must strive to become more
disciplined and force ourselves to begin the process.
Once maintenance managers get past the initial
resistance of improving maintenance systems and
structures, they must next insure that the appropriate
levels of commitment, understanding, and resources are
available from the entire management team. If there is
inadequate long-term support, improvement efforts won’t
be understood, will never be followed up on, and will
invariably fail before ever getting to the
implementation stage. If this is allowed to happen, we
will have wasted precious resources we could ill afford
to lose.
The Fundamentals of
Effective Improvement Management
There are three
fundamental requirements that must be in place before
you can sustain an effective improvement management
program at your facility.
The first fundamental
requirement of effective improvement management is a
solid bedrock foundation of desire for improvement from
plant management. No initiative can sustain itself, no
matter how many good ideas are identified, if the
management team has not given improved performance a
high priority. To improve, you must have resources,
both human and financial.
The second fundamental
requirement is the ability of management and the
workforce, to accept change, and at a minimum, an
expectation from management that improvement must
occur. Many initiatives have come and gone simply
because managers and their employees would not accept
anything different and continued to resist improvements
until the initiative stalled and went by the wayside.
The third
fundamental requirement is a structurally sound
Improvement Management System that fuels improvement
identification and implementation. Without a sound
Improvement Management System, good ideas are left to
whither and die on the vine because there is no system
in place to harvest them effectively.
The First Fundamental –
A Commitment from Management
Without a full
commitment from management, both from maintenance and
from operations, no improvement program can ever be
sustained. A full commitment involves much more than
just getting an improvement program started. The
management team must also be aware of what it takes to
realize beneficial improvements. It takes more than
just starting a program. It takes the understanding of
what lies ahead; the resistance to change and the
tendency to lose momentum as employees work through the
process. Without this commitment of resources and an
understanding of the process, change management becomes
just another drain on resources.
The Competition for
Resources
Every maintenance
supervisor’s day is filled with the things he, or she,
needs to do to be able to go home at the end of the
day. Whether it’s finishing up oversight of a job,
ordering tomorrow’s parts, or filling out today’s
paperwork, maintenance supervisors have a full plate of
activities. If improvement activities are going to
happen, some current, non value-added, day-to-day
activity must be displaced.
Resistance will come
from the supervisor whose workload you try to add to.
That supervisor knows that you are doing either one of
two things. Either you are adding so much load that he,
or she, won’t be able to go home at the end of the week,
or you are adding so much load that you have reduced
their chances for succeeding on the jobs their working
on. Either way, the supervisor is put in the
uncomfortable position of choosing. Given those choices
they will almost always resist.
To reduce the chance
for this, you must do a good job, upfront, of
demonstrating to the supervisor how the improvement
effort will help them succeed in the long run.
The Program Champion
While it is important
to put someone in place that is responsible for
improvement management and can monitor progress, it is
also important not to rely to heavily on a program
champion to receive the full benefit of the improvement
management process. Good changes in a company promote
more good changes and the improvement management process
will survive if employees have been involved in the
changes and believe in the process. That can help
insure the institutionalization of the improvement
management, whether you have a champion or not. If too
much emphasis is placed on the champion, and not on the
employees following through with the process, the
improvement process will go away as soon as the champion
moves on to new duties.
The Second Fundamental
– Acceptance of Change
Employees have a vested
interest in succeeding at their job. That interest
resides in the fact that every employee’s job is tied to
the success of his, or her, family. Without their job,
a person is no longer able to satisfy their primary
duty, providing for their family. In addition, our
primary responsibility to our families, we have a
secondary responsibility to ourselves to feel that our
work is important and that we are good at it. Our jobs
are what we take pride in, and in most cases, our jobs
define who and what we are. Any external efforts to
change that job, and what it means to us, without us
first having an adequate understanding of how that
change may affect our primary and secondary
responsibilities, will be met with resistance.
To overcome that
resistance, a company must become more adept at
communicating to the employee why the change is
necessary from a company point of view, and from the
employee’s point of view, how it will benefit them by
increasing their ability to become more successful.
“Resistance to change is not so much resistance to the
technical change, but rather resistance to social or
human changes that often accompany technical
innovations.”
The Third Fundamental –
The Improvement Management System
In baseball, reaching
any base other than home base means nothing. The same
holds true for a company that is working toward
improving performance. It does no good to identify
improvement opportunities if somewhere down the line the
company does not realize some kind of improved
performance. In fact, failing to “score run” is simply
another form of waste, no less costly than paying people
for an entire day’s work and then letting them go home
after a half a day at work. The ability to identify
improvement opportunities, or to get on base, holds no
promise if you can’t move the runner around the bases
and score runs. And just as a baseball team can’t win
the game if it doesn’t score more runs than its
opponents, your company won’t be able to compete with
its competitors if it cannot forever improve the level
of its performance and quality of its product.
Therefore, to improve,
management must focus on getting RBI’s, or Realistic and
Beneficial Improvements. To illustrate what is needed
for a functional improvement management system, the
following baseball analogy illustration will be used.
Stepping up to the
Plate
You can not get to home
base to score a run if you do not first step up to the
plate, get a hit, and get on base. In our baseball
analogy, getting on base includes becoming aware that
improvements can be achieved. This is accomplished by
being open to the ideas of others, investigating new
technology, getting training in a variety of different
areas, asking for the advice of experts, and objectively
assessing current performance levels.
Improving performance
begins with awareness and the acceptance that things can
be better. If management doesn’t know where the
performance issues are, or can’t accept that
improvements can be made, there will be no chance of
ever getting the program off the ground.
Getting on Base
Getting on base
includes identifying actual improvement opportunities
and the barriers that may exist that will prevent you
from achieving the identified improvement. This is the
phase in which you should identify and prioritize the
improvement tasks that will likely help you realize
incremental performance improvements.
Stealing Second
Stealing second base
includes identifying the resources that will be needed
to complete the improvement tasks, assigning prioritized
tasks to the correct individuals, and determining
sequence, timing, and completion targets.
Moving the Runner to
Third
Moving the runner to
third includes following up on the progress of those
assigned tasks from the improvement list. Remember that
day-to-day responsibilities always tend to overshadow
improvement efforts.
To avoid this, you must
always make sure that those assigned the responsibility
for completing improvement tasks understand that their
effort is important. One way to do this is to let them
know their progress is important by showing them you are
interested, and by giving freely of your time to discuss
progress with them. Initiation of this type of contact
reinforces the importance of the task and helps you
discern the progress and potential barriers to
improvement.
Scoring Runs
Who would watch a
baseball game if no one kept score? The same is as true
in business as anywhere else. No one on your team, or
in upper management, is going to want to watch a game
where no one ever scores a run. To keep everyone
interested in the progress of the improvement management
effort, the company must communicate to every team
member when runs are being scored and how the company is
benefiting from the effort. It is important to take the
time to stop and celebrate the successes of the team.
Imagine how low the interest would be in a regular
season baseball game if the next season started the day
after the World Series. Yet that’s how it often is in
maintenance. Maintenance personnel go from one repair
to the next, sometimes never getting the opportunity to
celebrate scoring a run or enjoying a victory. The
celebration of successes is what generates the
tremendous interest that is seen in sports today, and so
can it be used to generate an increased level of
interest in continuously improving equipment
performance.
Conclusion
Several factors will
influence improved performance. Of all of the factors
described, improvement must begin with the desire to
improve, fed from the awareness that improvement is
possible. This desire to be the best can help break
down the resistance of others, who in turn, will begin
to participate in the improvement process.
Once interest is
generated, it leads to the need for resources,
especially employee time, which is always hard fought
for. Good maintenance managers understand, however,
that to be able to get the extra time to improve, you
must first take the extra time to improve. Then the
department can begin the long ascent from where they are
now, to where they want to be tomorrow and beyond.
Bottom line, you can’t close the Performance Gap if you
can’t, or won’t, accept there is one, and then take the
necessary steps to close it.
Appendix A – The
Language of Improvement Management
Glossary of Terms
Acceptance of Change (AC)
– The cultural willingness of management, and their
employees, to change current practices and procedures in
an effort to improve. Change acceptance increases
proportionately as management’s skill in working with
employees to identify Improvement Identification
Opportunities (IIO) increases.
Action
Follow up (AF)
– The act of reviewing task progress in relation to
achievement of one’s goals. This follow up can take the
form of internal or external completion assessments.
Action
Planning (AP)
– The steps taken to identify the course to be taken
with respect to improvement opportunities and barriers,
to successfully achieve one’s goals.
Action
Taken (AT)
– The sequential steps taken/tasks completed to achieve
one’s goals.
Champion
– The project or initiative lead who is assigned overall
responsibility for the project’s progress and success.
The champion is responsible for developing a long-term
implementation plan and determining how to utilize the
people resources and funds that have been made
available.
Continuous Improvement (CI)
–
Continual efforts made by management and employees to
improve employee skills and management systems in an
effort to incrementally improve overall performance.
Current
Performance (CP)
– That performance achieved by your company at this
point in time, or at a given point in time you wish to
compare against, (end of year, beginning of fiscal year,
etc.)
Employee
Skill Levels (ESL)
– The current average level of skill held by your
employees.
Improvement Identification Opportunities (IIO)
– The expectation given to improve, coupled with the
opportunity of management and its employees to
brainstorm and identify improvement ideas.
Improvement Management (IM)
– The act of identifying incremental improvement
opportunities and then taking the necessary steps to
follow through to implementation, which also includes
measurement of progress achieved.
Improvement Management Index
(IMI)
– A comparison index that assesses a facilities’
Improvement Management Systems (IMS) by measuring a
company’s willingness, ability, and effectiveness at
capitalizing on a sustainable improvement initiative.
Improvement Management System (IMS)
– Those systems, structures, and resources set in place
to capitalize on improvement efforts.
Management Priority (MP)
– The awareness by management that improvement potential
exists and the priority they give to achieving those
improvements.
Optimal
Sustainable Performance (OSP)
– The potential performance that could be achieved if
employees made very few mistakes, equipment was
available most of the time, and systems and structures
flawlessly supported production.
Performance Gap (PG)
– The difference between your company’s Optimal
Sustainable Performance and its Current Performance.
Resources Available (RA)
– Resources, including time and funding, that are
specifically made available by management to support
improvement efforts.
Systems
and Structures (SS)
– Those systems and structures that are in place to
support the production of your product and the
reliability of your equipment. Includes Preventive,
Predictive, Routine Maintenance Systems, Reliability
Centered Maintenance, Root Cause Analysis, Total
Predictive Maintenance, Total Productive Maintenance,
and Improvement Management.
Systems
and Structures Effectiveness (SSE)
– The effectiveness of the company’s systems and
structures. Can be assessed by measuring levels of
waste and bureaucracy.
Appendix B – Formulas
for Effective Improvement Management
Performance Gap (PG) =
Optimal Performance (OP) – Current Performance (CP)
PG = OP – CP
To
reduce the Performance Gap (PG) you must strive to
improve current performance toward peak sustainable
optimal performance levels.
Current Performance
(CP) is directly related to the company’s Employee Skill
Levels (ESL) & its Systems and Structures Effectiveness
(SSE)
An increase of ESL
and/or SSE will result in an increase of (CP)
Your Current
Performance (CP) can be positively impacted by either
improving employee skills, through formal and on-the-job
training, and/or by improving Systems and Structures
Effectiveness (SSE), through an aggressive Improvement
Management System (IMS).
Improvement Management
System (IMS) = Improvement Identification Opportunities
(IIO) + Resources Available (RA) + Actions Taken (AT)
IMS = IIO + RA + AT
Improvement Management
Systems (IMS) can be improved by increasing any of the
IMS factors.
Actions Taken (AT) =
Action Planning (AP) + Action Follow up (AF)
AT = AP + AF
The actions taken will
increase proportionately to the level of Action Planning
(AP) and Action Follow up (AF) that occurs.
Improvement Management
Index (IMI) = Management Priority (MP) + Acceptance of
Change (AC) + Improvement Management Systems (IMS)
IMI = MP + AC + IMS
These are the
fundamentals of an effective Improvement Management
System. The Improvement Management Index (IMI) will be
increased by increasing any of the (IMI) factors, and is
directly related to improved company performance.
Gil Sargent is the owner
of THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED MANAGEMENT, ™, LLC and
is a specialist in Improvement Facilitation, Maintenance
Management Consulting, and Supervisor Training designed
to help companies increase equipment reliability,
improve plant performance, and reduce costs. He can be
reached at 775-753-6092
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