Maintenance Management Legends (part 6)

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

Torbjorn Idhammar IDCON - Maintenance consultants
Posted 4

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 6: New computer software (CMMS) will improve reliability and maintenance performance

It is not unusual to see a maintenance organization implement a new CMMS with the hopes that this new computer software will improve plant reliability. In truth, new software can be a great help, but it is only a tool.

If plant performance improves following a software change, it is not the software itself that contributes the majority of improvements. Improvements will be a synthesis of the implementation and execution of better work processes, behavior changes, and higher-quality data from the software. The obvious question then becomes, "Can't the plant improve work processes, behaviors, and data quality with the old CMMS?"

Sometimes maintenance software updates become so cumbersome that a plant disregards obvious fundamentals due to work overload. For example, the bill of material for equipment isn't always up to date in the old system, and it will not be up to date in the new system unless an effort is made to improve the data. It is a common argument that it costs too much to update the bill of materials, yet we accept the cost of having each craftsperson use a significant amount of time every day looking for parts.

In some plants, training is reduced to a minimum and often performed several months before the system is put in use. The result is that, at best, about 30% of the CMMS functionality is used and that only 30% of the people know how to use it effectively. This results in a 9% usage of the system.

If your organization is ready to implement a new CMMS, make sure you update the bill of materials, standard job plans, equipment numbering, and asset numbering in the old system. Also, ask yourself if you plan and schedule jobs well today. If not, the problem is usually not the software. People will blame the software because it can't talk back, but the real problems are lack of discipline in backlog management, prioritization issues, and the inability of operations and maintenance to coordinate production and maintenance schedules.

to be continued....