Back from the holidays this morning so the humour is great!! To make things worse the Cork hurlers were hammered by the Cats yesterday. Can’t see the “Drive for Five” being unsuccessful.

Had to make do with the English Newspapers while on the beach and one of the big debates raging in them is where will they get the money to pay for the replacement of Britains nuclear subs – Trident. (What with all the budget cutbacks, you see.)

Am I the only one who thinks it incredible that they’d run such capital intensive assets and only at their end of life begin to think about how to pay for replacing them? It’s really short term thinking (over years if that isn’t too paradoxical!!).

Such short termism – (what I call the “Quarter Thinking” – i.e. worry about this quarter only and forget about everything else) is one of the main reasons for the development of PAS55  - Asset Management. That forces you to think about how you are going to manage the asset over  four phases  - 1. Acquistion/Creation, 2,Utilisation, 3, Maintenance, 4, Renewal/Disposal.

It forces you to ask the questions and the answers clear away a lot of the fog!!

World Cup in full swing at the moment, the vuvuzelas are deafening and the millionaire players throw themselve to the ground in total agony as soon as they are tackled. Am I the only one who is thinking “get up you dope, you were barely touched?”  (As a Corkman, the match I’m looking forward to is the Munster Hurling Final in Thurles on July 11th. ) Skill, speed, strength, scores, excitement. 

The behaviours of these players on the pitch (and indeed off the pitch too – look at the French) reminded me  of something I read by D. Army.  He was talking about KPI’s  and said that  ” We have discovered that it is not enough to just manage the numbers.  What is of the most value is that along with developing the process is to develop a list of behaviors we want the organization to exhibit.  Then develop behavioral metrics that are aligned with the desired behaviors. ”

He’s certainly singing our tune (or playing our vuvuzela) when he says that it is extremely important that prior to commencing any installation or implementation activities that the new desired behaviors are identified.  Here are a few:

• People attend planning meetings and are prepared to make decisions
• A craftsperson knows what he or she will be working on during the next week or day
• A craftsperson is confident that he or she will be allowed to perform that identified work
• An operator knows what equipment will be taken out of service tomorrow
• A planner understands the importance of clear and concise work instructions
• Work is not permitted to begin until the parts are available
• Feedback is provided on Preventive Maintenance activities

In the ESS Ltd. CMI service, we have an implementation plan which puts in place the business processes and we carry out the training required. That’s the easiest bit. What we do after the implementation is put all our time and effort into changing behaviours because without these , starting at the very highest levels of the organization, firmly in place, it all just slips back to the way it was.  Ref: D.Army,Strategic Asset Management.

Ledet who is ex Dupont, says that in the ” Du Pont benchmark study, the most reliable performance in the world was Total Productive Maintenance. It was also the least expensive to achieve and sustain. ”

Then he goes on to say that “  The conventional wisdom is that maintenance best practices are planning, scheduling, preventative maintenance, optimized procurement, and predictive maintenance. ”

I’d say that some form of continuous improvement process has to be a given too. Otherwise, the best that we can hope for is that the performance will stay the same – and who would be happy with that?

We are working with a company at the moment who have done great work in getting all their spares sorted out and are now going to put them all up on their EAM system and link them to the work orders. Yes, the cynics would  say that this should be standard practice for every company, not even good or best practice and they’d be right. It is very positive though that they have put the work in to getting back control.

So, all movements, be they stock items or Direct Purchases or Contractor Items will now be linked to a work order. The engineering managers will now be able to confidently look up the on line stock catalogue and only schedule in work when spares are in stock. Cuts down on loads of hours “checking to see if it is in the store”  by going in there and rooting around and getting frustrated!!

Instruction from Finance – all stock will be entered into the system at a zero value .  That will mean that any cost reports run on spares won’t be of any value. Any other implications of putting in all the stock at zero value first day?

The cost of unreliability includes all costs resulting in any manner from poor reliability.

Came across this two pronged approach to determining what all these costs actually are. (Interesting that the approach includes ”Top Down, Bottom Up” - I first came across this expression in the Business Centred Maintenance Methodology from Tony Kelly at the University of Manchester.

High Level Cost of Unreliability

Trying to understand the total loss of money that results from poor reliability. We want to assess the cost as senior managers, accountants, or investors would. They are not particularly interested in what is causing the loss of revenue. They are only interested the bottom line.

The first category of Costs of Unreliability is direct costs, which are those factors that have a direct cause-and-effect relationship with a reliability event.

These costs include:

• The value of lost production – or the income that could have been made if production had not been interrupted.

• The cost of maintenance needed to perform repairs and restore operation.

The second category of Costs of Unreliability is indirect costs.

These costs frequently have no direct cause-and -effect relationship, but are the result of poor reliability nonetheless.

These costs include:

• The cost of being a reactive organization – or the cost of having to be prepared to respond to failures. An organization that performs a great deal of reactive maintenance needs to be larger than a proactive organization. It needs people both to keep things running and to respond to failures. It needs a larger staff to manage all the problems.  Managing problems keeps senior managers from focusing on future improvement and keeps them focused on the past.

• The costs of sloppiness – sloppiness is impossible to confine to one thing. It is impossible to confine a management philosophy that condones poor reliability to reliability only.

Poor reliability tends to infect other areas like quality, safety, and environmental performance. In assessing the Cost of Unreliability, it is important to include the impact poor reliability has on those areas.

• The cost of lost business – or the impact on your business from missing deliveries or making poor products while affected by poor reliability. Companies that accept poor reliability have two choices. First, their production and quality can suffer from poor reliability. If they want to prevent their poor reliability from affecting delivery schedule and quality, they have to have sufficient manufacturing capacity to both accommodate the losses and meet customer demands.

Second, they can have an inefficient operation that ultimately affects product costs. In either case, the customer will ultimately be unhappy and look for another supplier.

Detailed Cost of Unreliability

In assessing the Cost of Unreliability from a bottom-up or inside-out perspective, we will be trying to identify each and every issue that results in poor reliability and to quantify the relative value of that specific problem. Although the accountants and investors are not interested in this level of detail, this information is needed to build a plan of attack for corrective action. It is important to understand specifically what weakness is resulting in poor reliability and how large an impact is being produced. To be effective in making changes, we need to know what to attack and in which order we should attack each problem.

This article was excerpted from Reliability Assessment: A Guide To Aligning Expectations, Practices, and Performance by Daniel T. Daley (Courtesy Industrial Press

I never used to hear about companies wanting to hire Reliability Engineers here in Ireland until two to three years ago. Now, it is becoming more prevalent and I’ve come across some widely varying definitions of what the role is about too. Donald Ray of LCE reckons that one of the most fundamental aspects of what a RE does is is to track the production losses and abnormally high maintenance cost assets, then find ways to reduce those losses or high costs.
These losses are prioritized to focus efforts on the largest/most critical opportunities. The Reliability Engineer (in full partnership with the operations team) develops a plan to eliminate or reduce the losses through root cause analysis, obtains approval of the plan and facilitates the implementation.

I’d say he’s not far off the mark there - facilitating the implementation (i.e managing CHANGE can often be the toughest part!!) . In his approach is he in danger of focussing on Acute Downtime only and perhaps not on the Chronic Downtime?

Anybody agree these are the top eight reasons why our PM programs don’t always deliver?

1)Lack of Management Support
2) Lack of Maintenance Skills
3) Wrong Equipment Selected
4) No Changing/Updating PMs
5) Poor Schedule Compliance
6) Insufficient Detail on PM Sheets
7) Data Not Being Recorded
Lack of Understanding of EPA, OSHA, ISO Regulations

Met Terry Wireman at the MEETA -Irish Maintenance Society in Dublin last year and he reckoned they were the top eight.
Could there be another one?
Lack of buy in from the people actually doing the work?

These are contracts between functional areas of the plant which have an effect on overall reliability. I came across a study recently which claims that departments affect reliability in the following %
Sales (15%), Production (23%), Maintenance(17%), Procurement (12%), Plant Engineering (22%) and Management(11%).
Wow. How did they figure that out?
Anyone working with a company where there are such agreements in place between internal departments AND they aren’t ignored the first time there is a problem??

(Study was done by the RM Group in co-operation from the Reliabilty Manufacturing Association)

Happy New Year and ….Regulations – who cares?

We’re pretty anti-regulations here in Ireland. (Just look at the number of people still driving around talking into their mobile phones).

In maintenance, our anti-establishment leanings come to the fore particularly around audit time. We are pleased when we have managed to scrape through a particular issue or (better again) pulled the wool over the auditors eyes. I’m not saying its right but……can those who are without sin please stand up now??!!

The regulators/auditors are getting better though.

And the reality is that the regulators of our businesses are focussing more and more on maintenance.

At a recent get together with fellow maintenance managers, all from the Pharma/Healthcare side of manufacturing, all the talk was of how much more the auditors were scrutinising us in maintenance.

Regular questions asked were:

Can I see your backlog please? I mean your maintenance backlog. I want to see what maintenance tasks were not carried out.

Please provide me with a list of equipment failures in the last 1 month, 3 months, etc etc. I want to see what you have done about ensuring these failures don’t reoccur.

Can I see all your deviations in the last year.

A comment from one attendee ” They have drilled down through all the quality and validation stuff for years – now they are coming after us” .

We can’t let our guard down!!- read this …………..

A stark reminder of one of the cold hard facts behind why we need to keep adequate records on maintenance we do to our machines.

Just this month, a company down in Munster had a failure on one of their machines. They found it necessary to claim from their insurance company.  Wasn’t massive money involved – around the €30k mark – still significant though!!

Fact: Insurance company refused to pay out, citing the Law!!

The Law ( Chapter 2, Section 31 of SI 229 of 2007, Safety, Health and Wefare at Work, General Application Regulations) states:

” throughout its working life equipment is kept, by means of adequate maintenance, at a level such that it complies with the provisions of this chapter” and

” a maintenance log for any machine is kept up to date”

We all know that every aspect of every cost is being scrutinised. Is this the insurance companies “get tough” policy and how they are trying to keep their costs down? They are obviously scrutinising every claim much, much more.

Repeat: They refused to pay out, citing inadequate maintenance records.

Message is pretty clear isn’t it?  We should be keeping and using these records for analysis so that we can improve our maintenance.

If nothing else, we need these records for another critical reason too – keeping our Insurance valid!!