Identify the Reliability Gap

Facility managers need to ask themselves – What are the new energy paradigms that we must acknowledge, and what past practices are no longer smart or relevant? How can volatility be mitigated, and what strategies can be used to ensure it is not a major driver in rising operating costs?

The best results of maintenance practices carried out in enterprises critically depend on the efforts of maintenance staff to ensure their day-to-day actions comply with the schedule of services in order to avoid unwanted failures, correctly diagnose the behavior of active production processes, and ensure quality information recorded in the work orders.

After a couple of decades of testing, Lean business practices are now widely accepted as a major contributor to extraordinary customer service and profitable operations. But with this acceptance has come a new leveling of the playing field in many industries. The preemptive competitive advantages enjoyed by early Lean adopters have dissipated as more and more companies are “converted” to techniques that reduce waste and slash lead times. We have also come to the realization that only the most effective operations can position a company to compete with competitors who source off shore to suppliers in low cost labor markets.

Work order prioritisation using the CMMS is the next logical step that follows an agreed approach to asset criticality.

So, let’s start with my hypothesis that TPM drives all three elements of OEE, namely: machine availability, speed and quality.   Traditionally as a Maintenance Leader and then Operational Excellence (OpEx) leader in paper mills and packaging manufacturing plants, my focus was all about machine availability.  If the machine was running, it belonged to operations and I could focus on writing PMs, improving RCM and building Gantt charts for my next planned outage.  However, experience has taught me that just focusing on availability is missing 2/3 of the opportunity to improve business by not embracing the entire OEE metric through maintenance action. 

This article will discuss the difference between industrial coaching and mentoring and how these techniques can be deployed to grow our people, so they engage with processes and thus improve business performance.