The role of Maintenance within the Operational organization is built on providing a service of competing priorities where Corrective, PDM and PM activities struggle to meet the demands to realize sustainability. The premise, when achieved, equates to the comfortable awareness of predictable and manageable asset reliability while mitigating the risk of unscheduled downtime.
Unfortunately too often the systems we develop are not effectively understood, managed and integrated into the Maintenance and Operational organizations. The resulting factors define a culture focusing on immediate quick fixes undermining the integrity of the reliability ideology. Commonly this is a result of not developing and establishing a Maintenance Strategy, framework and processes to support the safety and production objectives that enable smooth consistent operation. Beginning with the vision statement feeding to the Maintenance Strategy, supporting management framework and reporting structure, reliability is a system which, like Safety is everyone’s responsibility. The reality is…if we are not managing a robust Maintenance & Reliability system we fail at providing the solutions to the core business pillars we endorse and live by.
With the preamble said…based on my experience, below are a few common pitfalls and practices that induce failure…from a Maintenance perspective.
1. Lack of Executive Management Support
Attempting to build a plan, system and governance guidelines is like pushing a string up hill if sustainability, production and safety are not top priorities. A good Maintenance programme increases reliability, increasing stable production while providing a consistent prioritized approach to work which increases safety.
2. Not implementing a Maintenance Strategy
The strategy is required to provide guidance to ensure consistency of Maintenance policies, objectives and requirements reducing the effects stemming from reactive, emergency corrective activities. Introducing vision, quality, metrics, tools, training, change management provides a platform for adoption and governance.
3. Establishing a Strategy without a framework
Many organizations create a strategy defining methodologies, lifecycle analysis, condition based monitoring, root cause failure analysis, PDM & PM programs along with the utilization of tools including the CMMS and supporting software’s. In order to continuously improve…change management, leading & lagging reporting performance and trend analysis guidelines. Unfortunately the framework often consists of individual silos of information and stakeholder groups that do not communicate effectively. Within the individual elements that the strategy and framework exist is the missing binding agent…communication and process adoption.
4. Not establishing a Methodology
Although this may sound redundant, if the Maintenance system does not establish a structured and integrated framework the risk of managing the asset both micro and macro perspectives may compromise health and sustainability. Methodology is required to ensure consistency and to reduce the risk stemming from gaps in analysis, communication and inexperience.
5. Installing a tool without a Process
Whether it is implementing a new version of CMMS, scheduling or condition motoring tool the lack of poor or non-existent processes leads to confusion, inconsistent data and loss in confidence in the role of Reliability & Maintenance. Realizing there is know out of the box one size fits all software solution. Each tool requires tailoring to manage the demands and requirements of the organization. The development of processes clearly defines and establishes gathering, reporting and analysis protocols at an objective level.
6. Not developing an Asset Prioritization matrix and tool
Reliability, Operations and Maintenance stakeholder groups need to have consistent tools, developed by all key groups, to best understand work prioritization and risk. This begins with establishing criteria and scale for assigning asset priority from both an HSE and Production Critical perspective. It is this list that will drive focus on PDM, PM, Corrective, Turnaround and Project activities. This list, when integrated into the CMMS and Work Prioritization Matrix will objectively help not only understand and manage asset care and attention, from a reporting view it allows crucial data to be reported, trended and managed effectively. Many KPI’s can be derived from asset prioritization which leads to transparency, better communication and resolving of key challenges.
