Belief-Driven Reliable Maintenance Management Culture: Beliefs 11-15

Belief-Driven Reliable Maintenance Management Culture: Beliefs 11-15

Christer Idhammar, Founder, IDCON INC

Posted 5/15/2025

Read The Belief Driven Maintenance Management Strategy: Creating a Reliability Culture Part 1 (Beliefs 1-5) and Creating a Reliability Culture with a Belief-Driven Maintenance Strategy: Beliefs 6-10

Excellent, consistent, and long-term leadership with well-defined and documented processes and the right people in the right positions are essential success factors for lasting results for any improvement initiative an organization undertakes, including improvements of Reliability and Maintenance performance. 

As a leader you need to create an organization that will follow you to make your vision, or future organization, a reality. In my experience as a leader I have found it very important to develop and communicate your beliefs to your organization. These maintenance management strategy beliefs will then be guiding your organization on their journey towards your goals.

Belief 11. Lost production reports shall record where and what, then ask why to solve and eliminate problems.

In most organizations the operations department is viewed as an internal customer to the maintenance department, and the maintenance department view themselves as a service organization to the operations department. This working relationship is often reflected in the lost production reports. Lost production is reported by department e.g. Operations, Mechanical, Electrical and Instrumentation etc. This serves no purpose more to find someone to blame. It is also very often wrong because it frequently reports the symptom instead of the cause of the problem.  E.g. an electric motor failed and caused lost production. This is often reported as down time due to electrical problem, but the cause to the motor failure can be something different. If you want to create a partnership between operations and maintenance the common goal between these two departments is reliable production. (Belief 10). 

This belief shall be documented and reinforced in a mission statement. An example of a production, or manufacturing mission statement could be. “In a partnership between operations and maintenance we shall safely deliver continuously better production reliability”.  Then all work processes, including lost production reports, must be designed according to the mission statement.

Instead of reporting lost production by department it should be reported where, when, what happened. A trigger is set to filter what events shall go through a Root Cause Problem Elimination (RCPE) activity. In a RCPE process the first step is to clearly describe the problem in a problem statement, then ask “why?” or “how can?” the problem occur. This process will help build a partnership. Also notice we talk about problems, not failures. The term failure will lead thoughts to equipment and maintenance, while the perm problem is more inclusive of everybody.

Belief 12. Keep things simple.

As stated in belief 9. Sustainable improvements in reliability and maintenance performance is “90%” about getting skilled people to work in a disciplined system. The technology part is important and easy to get people interested in. E.g. to buy a new handheld data collector for equipment condition monitoring can be interesting, but to use it in a disciplined system, report failures, plan correction of found failures, schedule execution of correction of failures, report what was done, and to use this information to avoid repetition of the failures, that is more of a challenge. 

Technology is the only thing that has changed significantly in the last 50 years. The principles on how to manage maintenance are pretty much the same. New names on well known concepts occur frequently and this can be very confusing to people. 

The picture below describes what many recognize has occurred in their companies over the years. 

Because of the confusion all these concepts and tools it is important to simplify as much as possible. Successful organizations have done that and focused on continuously improving the basic processes: Prevention, Inspections, Planning, Scheduling and Execution of work. 

Belief 13. The holistic system with its processes and elements can be supported by other tools and supporting processes.

A holistic overview of the reliability and maintenance management system, processes, elements, tools and supporting processes can be described in the models below. 

An example of a process is Planning and Scheduling, or the Work Management Process. It contains several steps and starts with Work Request then Priority of Request etc. as seen in picture below. 

The tools can be used to improve the processes in the holistic system. To avoid confusion and the “program of the month ailment”, it is very important that tools and are not mixed up with the holistic system. To be successful you must have a very well-established holistic system including its processes. Tools such as 5S, Six Sigma, Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) etc. are good and very useful when used in the right environment. Implementation of only a tool will only result in temporary non-sustainable improvements. The holistic system and processes must be in place to support sustainability and continuous improvement.

Belief 14. Always explain What, Why and How.

People do not mind change, but they do not like to be changed, (Belief 7). Any improvement initiative is a selling process. You need to have a clear vision of what the improvement initiative entails and why it is necessary to do it. You might have a clear idea of how it is going to be done, but after explaining the what and the why it is effective to ask people involved in the improvement initiative to come up with ideas on how they think it can be done. Focus first on getting an agreement on “The right things to do” then discuss how to do it. It is easier for people to agree on the right things to do then on how to do these things. 

Many organizations put too much emphasis on change management and make this more complicated than necessary. We often hear “We already do this” and this might be true. Most organizations do most of the elements of best reliability and maintenance practices, but most can do these elements much better. Of course there might be an element of change with some people, but as most of the improvements we talk about here, are common sense and nothing new, the change management element should not be neglected but not overdone.

It can also help to describe “What good looks like” and present a picture of what the future will look like. E.g.:

• Production Reliability improved by 3%
• Maintenance cost down by 15%
• Very few maintenance people on late shift (24/7 operation)
• Majority of basic equipment done by trained operators
• etc.

Belief 15. Execution is key to success.

The elements of a maintenance management system have not changed much since the 1960s. Technology such as computerized maintenance management systems, predictive maintenance tools have changed dramatically and are today much better and much more affordable. Since the 1970s industries has moved away fro fixed time overhauls and replacements of equipment components to much more condition-based maintenance.

It should be obvious that an improvement plan is executed, but many plans are never implemented to completion before a new initiative starts. I have seen so many excellent plans and Power Point presentations followed by no action.

Percent Effort Hours Spent on Improvement Initiative: 

The only major difference I have seen between the best performers and the lagging organizations is that the best performers execute well defined best practices. Most organizations know what they need to do, but they do not consistently execute the best practices better and better. 

Who will execute. A notice to managers. All improvement initiatives must be executed by the frontline organization, until they do, no results will be delivered. 

Christer Idhammar

Christer Idhammar started his career in operations and maintenance 1961. Shortly after, in 1985, he founded IDCON INC in Raleigh North Carolina, USA. IDCON INC is now a TRM company. Today he is a frequent key note and presenter at conferences around the world. Several hundred successful companies around the world have engaged Mr. Idhammar in their reliability improvement initiatives.

Awards:

• He received the coveted EUROMAINTENANCE Incentive 2002 award during the biannual EUROMAINTENANCE 2002 conference in Helsinki in June 2002. Among 19 member European countries he was nominated and received the award from EFNMS – European Federation of National Maintenance Societies – for outstanding achievement and worldwide accomplishments in the field of reliability and maintenance.
• In 2008 he received the Salvetti Foundation Best Speaker all categories award among 154 speakers at Euromaintenance 2008 in Brussels, Belgium
• In 2013 he received the “Best presentation award” among 120 speakers at Reliability 2.0 conference in Las Vegas.

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