We don’t have to be mind readers about what the big bosses want from maintenance. We just have to read the Wall Street Journal or any newspaper business section. Big bosses want less maintenance, big bosses want maintenance that does not interfere with production, and big bosses don’t want anything like accidents, environmental violations, or fires, to get in the newspapers.
The bosses are responding to the reality of their market places. They don’t necessarily see the retirement of skilled maintenance workers as a core issue but they do see the erosion of market share by competitors (both domestic and international). Bosses are constantly being exhorted by corporate management to lower the unit cost of production. In many companies, if the unit cost can’t be lowered, production will be moved to lower labor rate areas overseas or to plants with lower overall costs.
These conditions are the reality of the ridge road. Slow death on one side from erosion of market share, and quick death on the other from a plant closure. The ridge road is a tough road because the maintenance department is smaller and there is less opportunity for mistakes. The consequences of any mistakes are greater.
How do we measure this effect?
The ideal plant is bigger (more output without additional assets) because productive machines in a plant may break, because machines are not run to nameplate speeds, and a variety of other reasons. Maintenance has an impact on many of these items and can positively impact the others through getting involved and lending its expertise.
The easiest way to see this effect is to visualize your factory with a size proportional to output.
One measure developed to evaluate factory output by the TPM folks is OEE. OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness), which is a measure of the amount of effective output compared with the ideal output possible from the same plant, area, or machine. A typical factory might have an OEE of 50% to 80%. The 20% to 50% that is left represents wasted resources. The waste comes from breakdowns, model changes, material problems, small jam-ups, etc. Without spending any money on expansion, most plants could increase their output by half of these numbers (10%-25%).
Although reduction in the cost of maintenance is an admirable goal (and will be dealt with extensively in this text), the real money is in increasing the OEE of the whole plant.
Everything you ever wanted to know about maintenance can be learned on Star Trek.
Since 1967 Star Trek in its various forms has been a successful US TV series. It has undergone several redesigns. The maintenance message of the three main series is really all you need to know!
In the first series, the Chief Engineer was Montgomery Scott. He was a down and dirty maintenance guy from the old school. You would routinely see him crawling around the engine room with weird looking tools, fixing things. Scotty was a super repairperson with a complement of cool tools. Over time we find out that he is an accomplished engineer and designed the standards that all Star Fleet engineers use. Scotty was the 60sʼ vision of the ultimate maintenance guy. Scotty is paternal, tough, and competent.
In Star Trek, The Next Generation, the Chief Engineer is Geordi La Forge. Geordi is blind from birth but sees the entire Electrical Magnetic spectrum (as well as some other cool capacities) with his visor. In 100 episodes Geordi rarely, if ever, repairs anything. If there is a problem, he waltzes up to a computer console and reconfigures the Warp couplings (or whatever). He maintains the ship completely by computer! Occasionally when something strange happens and the computer fails he is also the ultimate repair guy, but this happens infrequently. We find out that he is also a leading physicist. He is the ultimate 90s maintenance guy using the computer to fix everything. So Geordi is hi-tech, personable, competent genius that is comfortable chatting up leading theoretical physicists and can also jump in and fix things
In the third series, Voyager the Chief engineer is B’Elanna Torres. Her ship was swept into the Delta quadrant (very far from home, it will take 70 years to get home, even at Warp 10) by Q (a childish omnipotent being). Her ship has some biology built in so it can repair itself. So unless they were attacked or run into some weird anomaly in space (which does seem to happen pretty often) the ship itself can fix most things. Ms Torres spends most of her time trying to coax a little more power from the Warp engines to get home faster. B’Elanna is the ultimate 2000’s maintenance person, no longer in the repair business but in the business of increasing output. She is powerful, loyal, passionate, and competent but is focused on the productive output not the repairs or maintenance at all.
We in maintenance contribute to the success of the organization. Our efforts can place the organization squarely in the middle of an admittedly narrow path. The goal of maintenance (like Star Trek Voyager) is eventually to eliminate the need for maintenance departments! The goal of maintenance is to do everything in its power to increase the quantity and quality of production, and reduce costs.
Article submitted by Joel Levitt, Author of Managing Factory Maintenance
The full chapter excerpt provided here is courtesy of Industrial Press
Comments (5)
You need to use a proper analysis to identify the tasks that are essential to avoid unacceptable consequences of deterioration in asset output quality and quantity. Note that I mention 'deterioration' not 'failure', as deterioration will affect output/revenue, cost and risk.
Depending where you start you may be able to reduce maintenance 'you have always done' but which is unnecessary or counter-productive but need to increase the workload with new essential tasks and tasks to bring the assets back into 'most appropriate' condition.
Bosses putting you on 'a ridgeback' are putting the business on a 'razor's edge'. Cutting down on necessary tasks to avoid unacceptable consequences of deterioration will put the company's survival at risk.
As there are no two groups that share common goals more than operators and maintainers, you must combine them in one group of process-based teams. This would require training of the former operators in recognising early signs of deterioration (they all do it when driving home and hearing some funny noises), with the former maintainers training them to do minor work to correct the deterioration. The former maintainers can do tasks that require craft skills. You will get more output at less cost, which increases your chances of survival Even the Unions should be happy with that. Combining these two groups removes friction and eliminates the need for daily meetings between them.
What is important and often missing in industries that have performance based contracts with senior managers, is a long-term view. This is the only view that allows a decision of increasing maintenance cost now, to gain cost benefits later.
The article refers to nameplate rating. The manufacturer of the asset, who wants you to remain happy with it, indicates a rating with such a safety margin that it will last a long time. The machine may be capable of delivering far more output. You should try to gradually increase output under close observation. You will reach a point where the weakest component will break. Replacing it with a higher duty one allows you to slowly creep up again until the next weakest component breaks. Of course you can only do this if you can accept the downtime when the component breaks. You can reduce that downtime by replacing the part with an identical part and go back to the original output. An iron ore processing plant in Australia claims to have trippled their plant's capacity at negligible costs, compared to having to build two more plants for the same output.
You don't have to attempt to turn your complete business approach around but it would be good to make a start somewhere.
Emile Eerens
1) Posted 8:31 pm, 01 April 2010 by Emile Eerens
2) Posted 6:20 am, 28 July 2010 by Wes Sheffield
I just would like to say that nowadays (at least in my country!) we need the 3 generations of Chief Engineer'skills in the same person.
3) Posted 7:29 am, 28 July 2010 by Fernando Trindade
I am a technician and when began to work at industrial facilities, Scotty involuntarily learned to me the bad and good about maintenance, then in other place learned more about the technology with a similar person like La Forge (programming, etc.) and few years ago was team leader of a RCM group and I felt like traveling at Voyager, another people fixing in situ the current problems and we achieving more output, for example in one área lowering the failure rate of 34 up to 0.
Greetings from Chile.
4) Posted 2:55 am, 29 July 2010 by Cristian Delgado H.
Conservation is the whole, has two branches, one hand is the preservation of assets and the other the maintenance of service quality they provide.
We do not know scientifically define what is maintenance
We do not have a Taxonomy that we clearly define the standard treatment you should give this terminology. Everyone puts a name to and that causes us to understand barriers and progress.
We believe that the confusion lies in attributing to the maintenance functions of conserving so that if we start by recognizing that
Every asset has two attributes, physical or material and the service it provides and that is the reason for its existence as it is done to meet human needs.
Then then recognize the Principle of Conservation tells us that the Service is maintained and the resource or asset is preserved.
So has two branches Conservation, preservation and maintenance, preservation are those activities that are aimed at preventing the same work environment or demerit in the asset, (corrosion, lubrication, cleaning etc.).. and maintenance work are those we make to ensure quality of service, and strengthens research networks active in the low reliability and system.
Having qualified teams numerically with respect to the relative importance of the Service have, you can see clearly what are the critical and important which the (now no longer be all computers). Based on this align their competitive advantages (mission, vision, standards, safety, environment). Then provide the type of strategy more attuned to their type (RCM, TPM etc.), Create their contingency plans and align their efforts to work with zero failures and zero defects. Ensure that someone is providing a solution to the low reliabilities of the system by providing a quality service stipulated by the process control of his company.
5) Posted 7:03 pm, 25 July 2011 by Carlos Lopez De Leon