Plant Services - August 2007 - (Page 66) BOILER ROOM BOILER ROOM Four short steps to excellence Maintenance is a state of mind, a state of awareness, a state of perceived value find you’re performing preventive maintenance on equipn many organizations, the word maintenance provides ment that continues to fail, you’re doing reactive maintelittle value. The true objective of the maintenance funcnance. Define your PMs based on a formal work identification often is misunderstood. But if it’s developed and tion process that maintains reliability using RCM, FMEA, managed with discipline, it provides great value. It mainetc. Some organizations have been successful with a PM tains company assets so that they meet the reliability needs program that was developed on the basis of someone’s expeat an optimal cost. Many people don’t understand that relirience or an OEM’s recommendations. ability is what an organization wants, not maintenance. ReMeasurement: To paraphrase Deming, you can’t manage liability is the outcome of maintenance. what you don’t measure. Managing maintenance and reliIn other words, reliability is what you must have so assets ability requires key performance indictors. Every organizameet your needs with repeatable results. In a production entional level must have simple measurements vironment, you want the lines to meet quality that tell the score. For example, an operator goals and standards with just enough maintemanages reliability by inspecting equipment nance to sustain reliability. In any environment, There are and reporting problems before they lead to an asset must provide that reliability and, thus, four basic functional failure. If an operator isn’t engaged must be maintained. There are four basic rerequirements in equipment maintenance, failure will occur. quirements you must have to be successful in you must have A maintenance manager manages using KPIs proactively maintaining assets. Understanding: Everyone in an organizato be successful such as PM compliance. If PMs aren’t completed on time, failure will occur. But many tion must understand the basics of maintein maintaining people don’t want to know the score because nance and asset reliability as well as share a assets they fear bad numbers. Well, the number is vision of the maintenance process. This can proactively. the number, whether you measure it or not. easily be accomplished by having everyone One method of knowing the score is a from upper management to production or opdashboard: a set of KPIs that reveal how one’s erations personnel attend training on the baarea is functioning in the world of maintenance and relisics of maintenance and reliability. Consider using someone ability. A simple KPI dashboard might include PM comfrom outside your organization to provide this training. Let pliance, scheduled compliance, percent of planned work, me know if you’d like to have a sample curriculum for trainmean-time-between-failures and budget compliance. An ing all levels of management. operator might have a dashboard that shows PM compliExecution: Discipline must be applied to the execution ance, MTBF and the number of breaks in the maintenance and management of the maintenance and reliability process. schedule. So you see, the dashboard performance data can To the maintenance mechanic, it means making repairs folreveal problems before they affect capacity, cost or quality. lowing prescribed steps and specifications exactly the same Follow these four steps to get you started on the path way every time. To a maintenance manager, this means makto a true world-class maintenance operation. Each step ing sure technicians are trained to a specific standard before is simple, however, each takes time, money and a certain being turned loose. Humans aren’t machines and human amount of discipline. Ignore them at your own risk. They’ve error is the largest reason for less than adequate equipment been proven for more than 40 years and have been applied reliability. Many studies have proven that 70% to 80% of by some of the greatest companies in the world. I wish you equipment failures are self-induced. Even with procedures success in your endeavor. Let me know if you have any quesin place, if management doesn’t provide adequate training, tions or need advice. maintenance personnel will induce equipment failures. Structure: Preventive maintenance must be defined, managed and executed as a controlled experiment. If you E-mail Contributing Editor Ricky Smith at askrickysmith@gmail.com. 66 www.PLANTSERVICES.com August 2007 I http://www.plantservices.com/voices/boiler_room.html http://www.PLANTSERVICES.com
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