Maintenance practices and technologies have evolved to meet the needs of the changing industrial environment. The function has evolved from a community of reactive fixers, to dedicated craftsmen, to proactive professionals. The next generation of personnel could well be based on practitioners of Quality Management Systems (QMS).

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.

The purpose of this article is to raise questions and challenge plant leadership on strategy, vision and execution of plant reliability and overall maintenance management. To start, we need to define reliability. Often times companies want to improve reliability but when you ask them to define reliability and how it’s measured, it’s unusual to get a comprehensive answer.

The maintenance impact on manufacturing results has traditionally been measured in terms of cost. As equipment reliability became a focus area in our industry, the strategic value of maintenance effectiveness became apparent to business leaders. For mill leaders, this brought the dilemma of balancing a need to reduce costs with an expectation that reliability must improve. From a total corporation view, wide disparity among site results establishes the need to lead and support change in maintenance performance. It is this kind of variability among sites that provides the opportunity to improve performance.

In most businesses, success is easily measured by looking at the bottom line; but what’s the bottom line in the maintenance business? To better understand how to evaluate maintenance business performance, it’s helpful to examine how businesses generate profits. Quite simply, businesses generate profits by providing goods and/or services at minimum cost and sold at a fair market price. Obviously, revenues generated from sales must exceed the costs. It is important to note that the customer determines the fair market price.

Reliability is not rocket science. It should be easy to achieve. Do things right the first time, from design, procurement, construction, installation, maintenance and operation, all the way through to decommissioning. Isn’t this the goal of engineers? Still, in many cases we —industry in general—seem to struggle in achieving high reliability. One reason may be widespread inattention to Mechanical Quality Assurance (MQA).

“Maintenance is a thankless job”, this is repeated by us every time and also sometimes, use it as a tool to be with the maintenance person. Many a times it’s true. We don’t appreciate their efforts as we cannot get their direct results like the sales showing their numbers, production showing their targets achieved and crossed.  The maintenance data is also recorded, tracked, presented and analysed, but it is viewed and understood only whenever the production or sales targets are missed due to some failure of the machine. In other words, we  try to understand the maintenance data with negative approach and to understand its impact on the business loss.

Novozymes North America, Franklinton, North Carolina, a company with Scandinavian roots and management style won the coveted North American Maintenance Excellence Award (NAME) 2000. A reporter (Michael Lippig) recently paid Owe Forsberg, Maintenance Manager, Novozymes North America, a visit to see how this came about.

Baby Boomers are going to retire soon. There won’t be enough skilled labor to fill all the jobs. Employers aren’t prepared to handle the labor shortage. It goes on and on. So, is this workforce shortage thing for real? Well, YES! The numbers don’t lie. By 2012, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) estimates there will be 165 million jobs and only 162 million people available in the workforce.