The current economic climate dictates that cost management is a critical activity for many companies and their managers. Maintenance is very often seen as an area where cost cutting targets can be easily and quickly achieved. Many maintenance managers take the view that this type of philosophy always ends up with increased costs in the future. This is not true in many cases. 15 years of analysis and review of maintenance programs by the author shows that most maintenance departments are more reactive than they should be and because of this, they over spend and underperform.

Christer Idhammar of IDCON INC presents the implementation steps you need to take if you want to be successful in improving reliability and maintenance, sustain that improvement, and continue to improve after that.

The concept of Best Practice is easy to describe and discuss – the more difficult part is determining your path towards reliability and maintenance Best Practice and more importantly, sustaining standards and developing a continuous improvement culture.

It never ceases to amaze me that no matter what industry you are in or how big or small of a company you work for, success is dependent on the ability to find, attract, hire, manage, develop and retain the right people. I continue to see companies disproportionately dedicate more focus and investment into non-people issues such as technology or equipment than focusing on getting “the right people on the bus.” I haven’t quite figured out why, but I believe it could boil down to one of three reasons:

Results-oriented organizations focus first on the quality and volume of production throughput, followed closely by the cost to produce the required quality and volume. This approach will improve reliability performance, which will drive manufacturing costs down.

With today’s limited internal resources, it’s tough to transform machine maintenance from reactionary to preventive, and ultimately proactive, despite the obvious upsides in higher overall equipment efficiency (OEE), better process control and lower total cost. Outsourcing this requirement to a third-party specialist, however, is a cost-effective alternative, according to companies that have crunched the numbers.

There is a saying: “What you can’t measure, you can’t improve”. The saying are not necessarily always true, but it is interesting, because I think a derivative of the saying is true: “What you measure, is usually what you get.”

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.