Maintenance Management 101: Part 3

Maintenance Management 101: Part 3

• Scheduling will enhance your credibility with Operations.
  Often, Operations personnel are reluctant to release equipment to Maintenance because they have been “burned” by broken promises in the past. That’s understandable; in a reactive environment, it’s difficult to make accurate estimates for repair duration because you usually don’t know what you’re going to find until you get into the equipment. Nor do you know what parts are going to be needed or whether you have them in stock.
  
  Creating a schedule for all the work you intend to do next week literally forces you to have forethought about the jobs you intend to do, including how long they will take. Even if you’re not formally planning, these estimates will likely average out to +/-30% accuracy when compared to actual performance. Planning, of course, will improve this accuracy and cut the variability in half.
  
  When you sit down with Operations to create the schedule, two things will likely happen: they will realize that you’re attempting to schedule your necessary work at a time most convenient to them, and they will gain an appreciation for all of the work you have to do in the week. They will no longer make the assumption that your craft technicians are sitting back in the shop, waiting for something to break. The schedule becomes a “contract” between the two parties – Maintenance agrees to have the resources (labor and materials) available to perform the work, and Operations agrees to have the equipment available at the appointed time.




• Reliability engineers are free.
  Well, not exactly “free” – but certainly at zero net cost to your organization. The primary role of a Reliability Engineer is to drive out sources of repetitive failure, through effective design of the maintenance strategy and through root cause analysis when failures do occur. When one considers the financial impact of critical equipment failures on labor, materials, and production loss, it is easy to see that this position can pay for itself. In fact, it may be the only position in the organization that can make that claim. Many organizations have set a performance objective on this position to return the equivalent of twice their annual salary in savings due to higher reliability.
  
  In order to be successful, however, the Reliability Engineer must be able to focus on his core responsibilities. Many organizations divert the effort by assigning ancillary duties to this individual, such as managing capital project installations. Reliability Engineering is a completely different discipline than Project Engineering and requires a different set of skills. Project engineering requires strong project management skills and the capability to do system designs. Reliability engineering requires strong data analysis skills and the capability to use tools such as Root Cause Analysis, Reliability Centered Maintenance, Weibull Analysis, and the like.
  
  Unfortunately, there are very few four-year institutions that offer undergraduate degrees with a Reliability focus. Most successful Reliability Engineers entered industry in another field and gravitated toward the discipline because of supplemental training. Although sometimes difficult to find on the outside, Reliability Engineers can be created, and can be one of the most valuable positions in your organization.



• You can’t manage effectively without data.
  “Should I authorize overtime next week?” “Should I extend the overhaul frequency on the XYZ machine?” “Is my PM program working the way it should?” “Where am I using the most labor and material resources?” These are all typical questions that face Maintenance Managers every day. Poor managers answer them with “gut feel”; good managers answer them with data. Where does this data come from? Obviously, much of it is provided by a properly functioning work order system (see number 2 above). Other sources are the production and quality control systems.
  
  Data also provides an opportunity to create a set of performance indicators that tell you how you’re doing against your goals and where your improvement opportunities lie. Performance indicators will drive behavior; the right set of indicators will drive the right behaviors. As such, they should be linked to business objectives to avoid the danger of “sub-optimizing” the maintenance function at the expense of the overall facility.
  
  It is always easier to sell an improvement idea to senior management if the justification uses objective data. Very few managers in senior positions have a deep understanding of the maintenance function; the merits of an idea may not be as obvious to them as it is to the folks on the shop floor. Ideas presented along with factual data, such as “upgrading this machine will result in the reduction of X lost tons at a value of Y dollars”, will stand a much better chance of success.