Up Time Magazine- February/March 2008

• Facility deficiencies at Walter Reed Garrison received corrective action to repair or replace broken, insufficient, or substandard components, such as walls, ceilings, plumbing or fixtures. • Wounded, ill and injured soldiers received priority consideration to occupy available housing. • Garrison housing managers assigned wounded, ill and injured soldiers, and families, to the best available housing units on the military installation, with the closest proximity to the medical treatment facility. • Standardized PM checklist to ensure checklist meets the requirements of maintaining the facilities to standard. • Leadership instructed to inspect their facilities weekly and report their status weekly to their higher chain of command. Ongoing Steps for Continuous Improvement • Perform maintenance and reliability process assessments at six US Army Medical Treatment Facilities to ensure these facilities use the best practices to maintain their facilities to the highest standards. • Design a new maintenance and reliability process which meets the future facility needs of the US Army Medical Command, where assessment identifies a gap. • Develop viable leading and lagging metrics, and dashboards, to be used by all levels of military leadership, to measure and monitor maintenance, and reliability issues at facilities. • Implement a training and certification program for maintenance leaders at all Army Medical Treatment Facilities. This training and certification will become the standard for contractors and US Army personnel. • Develop a system to collect and analyze feedback from wounded, ill and injured soldiers, their families, physicians, nurses and other key staff, as part of the preventive maintenance program. • Ensure new facilities are designed and constructed to meet the needs of the Army’s wounded, ill and injured soldiers, and their families. • Launch a new software package to help support facilities management, including tracking the type of out-patient assigned to a specific type of room (American Disabilities Act), if Preventive Maintenance was performed on time, outstanding work orders on rooms, etc. • Implement new maintenance and reliability processes throughout US Army Medical Command World Wide, if, during the assessment, any gaps are found in the current maintenance and reliability process. 1. Ensure metrics are in place to verify your organization’s Preventive Maintenance Program is working. Just a few recommendations: a. Track PM Labor compared to Emergency Labor Hours b. Track Mean Time Between Failure c. Walk through your facility or plant, make sure what your metrics show is what you see with your eyes. 2. Inspect your Preventive Maintenance Procedures and ensure they have specifications, steps, procedures, and time standards clearly delineated. Use checklists. If a maintenance person tells you they don’t need checklists, they are telling you they have an unlimited and an infallible memory, which is not possible. 3. Rank your assets and/or facilities based on risk to your business or organization. Ensure your high-risk assets have 100% PM Compliance using the 10% Rule of Preventive Maintenance. 4. Attend training on asset reliability, which discusses both preventive maintenance, and reliability-centered maintenance, in the same program. Reliability Centered Maintenance methodology is where all true preventive maintenance programs are developed, focusing on failure modes and risk associated with them. MAJ Ricky Smith has spent most of his life as a US Army Reservist, a maintenance professional in maintenance management, and as a reliability consultant in private industry where his skills and knowledge from each area have served him well. He developed his skills and experience while serving as a maintenance company commander in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq and Kuwait and consulting with large corporations in their reliability initiatives to save jobs and lives. He is a noted Author of such books as Lean Maintenance, Rules of Thumb in Maintenance and Reliability Engineering, and Industrial Repair – Best Maintenance Practices. Ricky can be contacted at Richard.alton.smith@us.army.mil Summary of Recommendations No matter how large it is or how strong its leadership, no organization is immune to serious maintenance problems, which have the potential to create controversy or major financial loss. In other words, what happened at the Walter Reed Garrison facilities could happen to any organization. To ensure this does not happen to your organization, follow some of the simple recommendations detailed in this article. Figure 6 - Building 18, Walter Reed Army Medical Center (courtesy of WRAMC) 14 february/march 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Up Time Magazine- February/March 2008

Up Time Magazine- February/March 2008 Contents Upfront Upclose: Lessons Learned from the Walter Reed Story Information Technology: Parenting and Asset Performance Infrared: It's Alive! Lubrication: A Sense of Change Maintenance Management: PdM, Standardized Motor Testing: Being Well Connected Precision Maintenance: How to be Marketable Reliability: The Voyage of Wells Dairy Ultrasound: Two is Better Than One Vibration: Diagnosing a Cracked Shaft Upgrade: A Different Kind of Journey

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