Let’s face it, most companies need a culture intervention – something like a 12-step program. This article will explore behavioral issues that are often at the core of a culture of neglect and mediocracy. It borrows much from management science, leadership principles and conversations with individuals working in the field of maintenance reliability.

So, if you’ve had this discussion, which you will have at some point in your career, and if you haven’t heard it a hundred times already, you need to reduce maintenance costs. Have this discussion – how do we do this? What happens in most places is that maintenance cost X this year, last year it  was X minus 5%. Why do we do that? Well, this year we have this big rebuilding of boilers…

Technical visionaries often invoke terms like the Internet of Things, smart machines and machine to machine (M2M) to ease our fears about managing the upcoming brain drain that accompanies the graying American industrial workforce. The theory goes that one day, self-learning machines and massively parallel computing may replace the operator. Perhaps, but not in the foreseeable future. That’s because smart machines are very good at keeping us from doing dumb things, like stalling a commercial airliner, or pushing a gas compressor beyond safe tolerances. In the realm of black and white, the value of artificial intelligence is unassailable. But what about the rest of the time?

Picture this: It’s Monday morning and you’re the maintenance manager of an industrial plant. On your desk is a printout of 432 open work orders and the operations manager is screaming because air compressor #2 just tripped for the third time this month. To make matters worse, you just remembered two of your technicians went fishing for the week. The question is: “What can this maintenance manager do to improve this situation?” The obvious answer is to go fishing with the two technicians. Maybe a better question to ask is: “What can be done to improve plant performance?”

REM recently caught up with Christer Idhammar, founder and executive vice-president of IDCON INC, and asked him to share his perspective on World Class maintenance.

The way we see maintenance work being done, you have preventive maintenance which is done is to prevent a failure or to detect a failure early. Continuous improvement, you may have some those, those are the things to be done from redesigns. I can see you doing that in two cases…one is if you have a root cause and you see whatever you have a problem on you have a piece of equipment that is not working right…you may have to redesign it.

Improving the capabilities of those in a leadership position is viewed as a top initiative in many organizations. More and more companies are moving their focus in management from compliance cop to performance coach, due to the realization that if there isn’t an understood correlation between what performance obtained the results, the outcomes are due more to luck than purposeful effort.

How do you move your reliability improvements forward? Do you know how good you are? You need to identify the Reliability Gap.