In May 1995, a company we will call ACME North America to protect its identity, began a focused effort to improve manufacturing performance at one of its major production facilities. Particular attention was given to improving plant reliability and its potential impact on increased uptime and lower maintenance costs.

The cost of maintaining the status quo is enormous. The status quo affects each and every one of us every hour of every day, at work and at home. We have come to accept doing nothing as a safe and acceptable alternative. We even make it the default solution. Doing nothing is the management equivalent of a baby’s soother. It makes us feel safe and comfortable. But there is a cost to doing nothing.

It’s not uncommon to see maintenance departments accept goals, concepts and projects just because we are told to or because it seems to be the norm for the company. We don’t always question the validity or logic when someone influential suggests a path forward. Plant maintenance professionals should know reliability best. When making reliability decisions, maintenance needs to speak up and not accept inefficient or incorrect decisions.

In my consulting and educating roles at Noria, I’m often asked what effective plant reliability management looks like. How does one recognize it when he or she sees it? While there are plenty of details, I’ve boiled it down to the following 12 dimensional elements.

In August 2002 I spent a week in Japan at the chemical plant of an internationally renowned chemical manufacturer. While there I asked them about how they do their maintenance. They told me about their maintenance philosophy. And I want to pass on to you what I learnt about the Japanese way of doing maintenance on that trip.

For the most part, we can describe in fairly exacting detail the functional components of a strong reliability program. Moreover, we are confident that implementing these reliability practices will yield results that benefit virtually every aspect of our business and provide distinct competitive advantage. However, we seldom see these reliability practices and results in an operating plant. This is what I call the Reliability Paradox.

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.

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.

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.