Maintenance Management Legends (part 2)

part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7

Torbjorn Idhammar IDCON - Maintenance consultants
Posted 11-08-04

There are many paradigms and legends surrounding maintenance management in plants. Often, the legends are known to be untrue, but people live with them because it is politically correct, or simply convenient. To be successful in improving equipment reliability and maintenance management, plants must break the legends that exist in their organizations. Some of the legends will be addressed in this article. You may find that these legends are uncomfortably close to describing how your plant operates.

Legend 2: People don't like change

I often hear that people don't like change. In my experience, people love change — they just don't want to be changed by someone else. People are often very receptive to change as long as they are part of the change process. The problem is when a project improvement plan goes through the usual number-crunching, while the involvement of people is often forgotten.

For example, people in the plant typically can identify planning and scheduling improvement opportunities, yet most of us are reactive by nature; we don't want to work to strict guidelines, such as planning and schedule exactly what to do three days from now. Improving planning and scheduling requires a culture change together with detailed, agreed- upon processes and procedures. Even though we know this, plants sometimes try to improve planning and scheduling by talking over a cup of coffee, or at best sending a couple of planners on a two-day planning and scheduling course.

Production and operations changes are often 80% to 90% dependent on technical solutions including process automation. An equipment reliability and maintenance change initiative is 95% dependent on changing peoples' behavior. Management must address the issues of involvement and acceptance while encouraging the few enthusiastic souls in a project. Project success can be expressed as R = Q x A x E (Results = quality of actions x acceptance for change x enthusiasm for change).

to be continued....