The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Maintenance Organizations - HABIT 6

Habit 6 – Synergy

Covey says this is the habit of creative cooperation. The principle is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, which implicitly lays down the challenge to see the benefits and potential in another person's contribution.

In our example earlier, operations didn’t want to have the machine down at all, and maintenance felt they needed it for a full eight hours to repair the equipment properly. What if they compromised and agreed to repair the equipment in four hours? In that case, neither party would get what they wanted. In reality, that’s a lose-lose situation, the worst of the four possible outcomes in Habit 4.

Compromise should be a red flag that things aren’t right.

Instead, to find the win-win, one must proactively seek first to understand what it is that operations really needs. As a result they may say that it’s just not a good time for the equipment to be down. It’s possible that it wasn’t a good time for maintenance either. Maybe maintenance needed eight hours because the welder was out or a necessary part wasn’t in-house, so a part would have to be fabricated. During the conversation, it may be discovered that a combination of a temporary repair and a reduced load would allow operations to get their production out and allow maintenance to order the part and align all the necessary resources to fix the job right.

Now, instead of a lose-lose there is a win-win. Seeking to understand the other group’s needs is key toward establishing trust between departments. Some common activities during which synergy takes place in highly successful organizations are: Reliability Centered Maintenance Analysis (RCMA) sessions, Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA), Criticality Ranking sessions, and through Planner’s reviews of feedback forms completed by craftsmen at the close of Planned Maintenance activities.