Top 10 steps to world class14 December 2013

Zero breakdowns and impeccable plant reliability don't have to be the preserve of those with six figure budgets. Max Gosney gets some inexpensive tips on achieving maintenance nirvana from former Nissan maintenance engineer and Sora consultant Dave Peart

1) Have a clear strategy
The whir of tumbleweed blowing across the shopfloor is the only sound you're likely to hear when quizzing many factories on their maintenance strategy. "Most companies couldn't demonstrate a clear maintenance strategy," says Dave Peart, maintenance consultant at Sora Group, says of his project work with more than 40 manufacturers. "They couldn't tell you in a sentence what their maintenance strategy was."

Typically, maintenance departments are left to their own devices while the rest of the site works towards common business objectives. It's the manufacturing version of the ostrich. Heads in the sand and hope downtime doesn't catch you. Time to stop doing the ostrich and start acting like a wolf instead, recommends Peart. Factories where maintenance departments are treated as part of the pack are able to hunt down those breakdowns long before they become a threat.

And making maintenance part of the bigger strategic picture doesn't have to involve pages of equations, he adds. "If it breaks, fix it quicker, don't let it break again and don't let it break in the first place. It doesn't need to be any more difficult than that... If your strategies can be linked to that, then you're onto a winner."

2) Make maintenance part of the team
Productivity is the loser, if the plant canteen looks more segregated between maintenance and production than the crowd at an Old Firm match. An 'us and them' attitude can result in operators re-categorising essential daily maintenance as tasks for the spanner brigade.

Maintenance meanwhile busy themselves building clever countermeasures, rather than responding to immediate shopfloor concerns. Peart reflects: "There's 30 seconds in a production minute and 90 in a maintenance minute... Production takes priority: you are only there as a maintenance department to [help] make product. And the best way you can do that is by keeping kit working."

You might also want to remind production to start looking closer to home the next time they reach for the stopwatches after a breakdown, adds Peart. "A production department gets the maintenance department it deserves. If the production department is slack, maintenance will happily join in."

3) Use a KPI
If you can't measure it then you can't improve, as the old adage goes. Maintenance is no different, says Peart. Your measures shouldn't be bogged down by algorithms and decimal places, he adds. "Have simple and clear measures. Don't blind everyone with mean time to repair, or mean time between failures. Have a simple measure that you can track."

Peart eschews in-vogue metrics, such as OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) – which combines formulas on availability, performance and quality – in favour of a back-to-basics breakdown rate calculations. "It's the best measure we've found. The amount of time a piece of kit is down divided by the run time, multiplied by 100."

4) You can't hire your way out of trouble
Alongside the lottery win and a candlelit dinner with Charlize Theron, every maintenance manager dreams of being handed a blank cheque to hire as many engineers as they like. But all three scenarios are just as unlikely. Far better to focus instead on making better use of the resource you've got, advises Peart. "It's not that you haven't got enough people: it's just that you have too many breakdowns for the number of people you've got.

"It's easier to get rid of the breakdowns than justify extra salaries. If you've got 10 people in your department working to a poor strategy, then 10 new people are just going to join in. Before you start looking, make sure your strategy is right."

5) Poor managers get poor maintenance teams
It's up to you, as the manager, to set the ethos of your maintenance team. More importantly, you must have the courage to confront employees who fall short of what's expected, asserts Peart. "You can't manage skill, you can only manage attitude and behaviour. You can have the most skilled engineer in the world but, if they're not joining in, they're no good. The management team sets the culture. If the culture is wrong, you are probably to blame."

6) Always target the root cause
Being satisfied with fixing the symptoms of the breakdown is like a gardener settling for pulling the leaves off of a weed. Things will look neat and tidy for a while, but it's only a matter of time before the problem resurfaces. Far better to dig deep and remove the problem by the roots. Peart's view: "What we're really good at in Europe is training people how to find faults. We put a fault on a test rig and people find them. We don't teach them to target root cause."

There's a very simple test for finding where your team ranks on the root cause versus find-and-fix spectrum. "The first technician finds a breakdown, makes the repair, then attends another breakdown. The second technician attends a breakdown, makes a repair, understands the root cause, countermeasures it, documents it, then attends another breakdown," explains Peart. "Most people have the first type. So you have to pick a maintenance strategy that changes their ways. Otherwise you can stick as many RCMs [reliability centred maintenance] and TPMs [total productive maintenance] in as you like, but it isn't going to work.

7) Small problems add up
Breakdowns come in two main types: catastrophic and chronic. Don't give in to the temptation to concentrate solely on the former advises Peart. "Every now and again you get this big catastrophic breakdown that everybody gets involved in. The trouble is that chronic stuff, over time, can result in bigger losses."

All sites should record their typical breakdown incidents and categorise them by severity. Once you have data on the types of breakdowns you've suffered and how much time they're draining, you can prioritise which problems to fix first, advises Peart. The process can reveal some astoundingly simple fixes, he reveals. "We've worked with lots of companies where a breakdown becomes major, because the maintenance guy takes 20 minutes to get there when the problem was a five-minute fix."

8) Get the skills in the right place
It's the factory version of sod's law. The belt breaks during a night shift, causing disarray, because Trevor – who switched to mornings last week – was the guy capable of fixing it within two minutes. "Shift profile causes problems," comments Peart. "Everyone has had a breakdown where the guy on the shift coming in knows more about it than the fellow that's just gone off, and solves it straight away." Take control by co-ordinating your maintenance expertise across shifts.

9) Don't get too hung up on acronyms
RCM and TPM have parts to play in improving the reliability of your plant. But acronyms will only work alongside a ferocious management focus on daily maintenance duties. "With TPM, we go straight for the top and try and become world class," says Peart.

"It typically fails because a production guy writes down what's wrong and maintenance is too busy and doesn't fix it. Then the production guy gets sick of filling in the form, so stops doing it... TPM and RCM work, but they've got to be in the right environment. At 2am when it all grinds to a halt, they're not much help. You have to get that daily practical maintenance routine in place."

10) You can take on the big boys
Maintenance is a great leveller, says Peart: a humble SME can outperform a mighty global manufacturer, providing it has a clear, integrated maintenance strategy and the discipline to enforce it daily. "Best practice is a mindset. It isn't a budget; it isn't tools and techniques; it's the mindset of the people who run the maintenance department... If you decide to do it the right way, you'll deliver best practice. Concentrate on daily management: the end of the month will sort itself out."

Max Gosney

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