Maintenance Technology August 2014 - (Page 21)

RELIABILITY SOLUTIONS Confronting Challenges on the Path to Reliability According to Marshall Institute's Tom Furnival, the textile manufacturer described in the accompanying case study had its share of roadblocks on its journey to reliability. "The biggest goal," he points out, "became the biggest challenge. Improving maintenance's contribution to the overall organization was hard." Maintenance needed to be viewed as a business partner. Team members realized that the more they aligned strategically, the more valued and professional they became in their colleagues' eyes. "Thus," Furnival says, "they constantly challenged others to view maintenance not just from a cost standpoint, but from its potential impact on capital. Communication played a critical role in doing this." Another challenge, according to Furnival, involved gaining the needed resources for all facilities. These had ■ Leadership has come to realize the important role maintenance and reliability plays in the organization. ■ Operators and technicians have learned the value of a proactive, planned environment. ■ The company has moved to a value-driven, costcontrolled outlook, rather than focusing solely on cutting costs. This manufacturer's successful reliability journey was not without challenges (see sidebar), but according to Folts, it never "settled." Forging ahead Continuing on a path to excellence, the company is looking at its future goals and aspirations. Among other things, Folts says, it's working to standardize job practices and organizational structures across all facilities. "They have big plans for continued improvement of their CMMS through a major planning and task overhaul to the system," he says. "For greater accountability, transparency and cost tracking, they want to build in budgeting and variance reporting processes for maintenance." Folts characterizes the leadership teams and TPM group as having "a real passion and love for what they do" and holding their plants and people accountable. "The VP of manufacturing," he says, "is very engaged and requires all facilities to report out AUGUST 2014 to be requested by various leadership teams, which were led by the plant managers. Consequently, ownership of the process by the plant managers was critical. As to what could have been done differently, Furnival says communication with the shop ﬂoor about the objectives and reasoning for embarking on reliability improvement could have been handled better. "Part of the approach," he notes, "put a lot of conﬁdence in local resources to act as communication conduits. As was later discovered, however, many messages weren't passed on." Finally, Furnival says that the company also believes it could have narrowed its initial implementation focus to a few facilities and not stretched resources as much as it did. quarterly on their focus team efforts. They are required to provide status reports on strategy improvements and there's a 'state of the union' twice a year by executive leadership." This level of focus and accountability, he notes, has permeated the plants. As one plant manager told the Marshall team, "We have the attitude of 'do your best.' There is a great deal of loyalty to the company. We all want to support it and pursue excellence every day." Folts says that instead of accepting their successes and notoriety in the market, this company only wants to get better. "If you ask team members about what they have accomplished,." he explains, "they'll spend more time talking about what they want to achieve and improve. They want to continue to build critical mass for the revolution. The continuousimprovement mindset has driven them to never settle. They know a reliability focus is key to the performance, efficiency and value of maintenance and, ultimately, the entire company." MT Greg Folts is President of Marshall Institute and Tom Furnival is Director of Training. E-mail them at gfolts@marshallinstitute.com and tfurnival@ marshallinstitute.com. Marshall Institute is a Raleigh, NC-based asset-management company providing maintenance and reliability consulting and training services to industry. MAINTENANCETECHNOLOGY.COM | 21 http://www.MAINTENANCETECHNOLOGY.COM

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Maintenance Technology August 2014

Maintenance Technology August 2014