Build your Reliability and Maintenance Strategy

Owe Forsberg, Vice President IDCON INC.

Imagine you are the Engineering and Maintenance Manager at a new manufacturing facility. The Plant is a major greenfield site with a CapEx budget over $1 Billion and already broken ground. During the construction and commissioning you’ll be part of startup testing, managing contractors, reviewing final design, hiring, and training the new maintenance and engineering personnel, developing the maintenance PM program, implementing planning and scheduling of work, selecting parts and setting up the storeroom – developing a new Reliability and Maintenance Strategy!

It’s already a challenge to stay on top of the construction, change orders and commissioning and now you must think about developing your reliability and maintenance strategy.

So, what should you do you start building a reliability and maintenance strategy that puts you on the right path to excellent performance?

Here’s some items to get you started:

Define The Vision and Mission of reliability and maintenance
Asset management responsibility must be anchored, accepted and promoted by top management.
Establish detailed targets before the plant startup. Some examples are operations OEE, utility reliability and quality.
Develop and implement best practices. Get outside support to avoid overloading the staff; this ensures that all key processes are in place during the startup of the plant.
You must hire the right people to implement best practices in R&M.
Include Maintenance and reliability early in the idea phase and be part of the detailed design specifications.
Develop and introduce workflows for the key R&M processes
Involve the asset owners (i.e. operations) when determining criticality. The criticality is the basis for the R&M strategy for the equipment.
Implement the root cause problem elimination process for all levels in the organization not just for management.
Your RFP must specify the technical information and spare parts to get quality and accurate data.
The spare parts budget should be based on the criticality assessment and not an arbitrary number from another plant.

Get a Reliability and Maintenance assessment

Having a partner like IDCON can help you get up to speed on best practices. We start with our Current Best Practices assessment. You’re thinking, “I don’t have anything to assess” that true but our assessment gives you the blueprint to develop your best practices. It’s faster than figuring it out on your own and will give you an idea of the resources you need to have in place.

Maintenance and operations partnership

Your reliability and maintenance strategy is critical to support the overall operational plan. It’s imperative to include operations and quality from the outset. This insures a partnership agreement is formed. You should develop KPIs to measure the success of this partnership.

Build Reliability and Maintenance Workflows

Workflows define the specific activities that must be completed and who is responsible, accountable, consultant and informed (RACI) for them. They are the building blocks to create job descriptions including the roles and responsibilities of key staff members. Your HR department will know exactly what staff you need and what’s required of them.

Work Management workflow is important when building a reliability and maintenance strategy — Work Management Workflow with tasks, roles and resources

Equipment strategy – start with a risk assessment

Get the asset owners involved in this process. Work together to determine the risk matrices and criterion.

Score each criterion on a scale from 1-10 creating a reliability ranking of all the production systems. The ranking determines the reliability strategy for each component in the system. An interesting idea is to make the rankings memorable by naming them after something familiar.

The next step when building a reliability and maintenance strategy is to decide on the technology and procedures to use for condition monitoring. You need to do this prior to engineering design packages, especially if you are planning on using machine learning. Not making these decisions early could cost you more money in the long-run.

Technical Database

We work clients to develop a standard for the the equipment master data as a specification for the project engineering company. These standards include all basic information to be provided in a specific technical database program.

Why? Projects such as this should have the OEM manuals and spare part lists for all equipment as part of the RFP to the project engineering company. The negative consequence is that the information provided can be delivered in many different formats and may even be missed. This can create a quality concern if you have equipment that directly comes in contact with the product that has to have traceability back in the chain of custody.

These are just a few of the considerations you need to think about when building a reliability and maintenance strategy. The bottom-line is this: if you are in expansion mode or building a new greenfield plant, you need reliability and maintenance best practices in place. If not, you’re going to behind from the start.

Owe Forsberg

Owe Forsberg is the Vice President at IDCON INC., a consulting firm offering common sense consulting and training for industry reliability and maintenance. He has over 30 years of experience in the industry coaching clients to increase output and decrease cost of manufacturing and operation. In addition, Owe provides clients with comprehensive evaluations of operating efficiency related to maintenance and reliability processes.

How to Fix the 70/30 Phenomenon

When you ask front line supervisors or team leaders if all people in their teams are performing to the same standards or if some are doing more work and achieving more results than others, you will often get the same answer. All over the world, the most common answer, after some analysis, verifies that about 30% of the people do 70% of the work.

Zen and the Art of Managing Maintenance

Unfettered expression and spiritual satisfaction? How does this relate to managing a maintenance department, especially one in the U.S. Postal Service? Open your mind. Take a page from the Zen Buddhist monks who preach: When you are quiet and listen, you become aware of sounds not normally heard. USPS maintenance leaders are listening and beginning to understand that maintenance success doesn't come through closed minds and closed doors.

Why do maintenance improvement initiatives fail to deliver? (Hedgehog or Fox?)

It is not uncommon that many reliability and maintenance improvement initiatives fail to deliver expected results. Why is it so? Some of the most common causes I have observed include:

Why Maintenance Improvement Efforts Fail

Why do improvement efforts fail or perhaps not sustain the gains? There are many reasons, but those most often stated are “lack of commitment” and not “following the process”. But why is there lack of commitment, and why aren’t processes followed? Here are a few of the reasons that I’ve seen:

TPM and RCM: Whirled Class

When a piece of production machinery broke down at the Whirlpool plant in Findlay, Ohio, several years back, it was accepted practice for the machine operator to call maintenance and then sit back and wait for the problem to be fixed. Critical information and knowledge was not shared between the operator and maintenance technician. Like many companies, these workers were stuck in traditional roles - operators run the machines, maintenance fixes the machines, and the two do not cross. As a result, productivity opportunities were missed.

Where Do Maintenance Professionals Come From?

Many managers are unaware that best-in-class companies routinely design-out maintenance at the inception of a project. That, clearly, is the first key to highest equipment reliability and plant profitability. Whenever maintenance events occur as time goes on, the real industry leaders see every one of these events as an opportunity to upgrade. Indeed, upgrading is the second key, and upgrading is the job of highly trained, well-organized, knowledgeable reliability professionals.

TPM and Tecate: The New Translation

The true translation — might it be proper to say a new and improved translation? — is being used today by Cervecería Cuauhtemoc Moctezuma, one of the largest brewers of beer in Latin America. Known throughout this company as Mantenimiento Alto Desempeño (MAD), or translated as High-Performance Maintenance, the concept of TPM is alive and well at the company's six plants in Mexico. Perhaps the best example is at CCM's brewery in Tecate, located a short drive from the U.S.-Mexico border on the Baja California peninsula.

Build your Reliability and Maintenance Strategy