If you are like most people who work in a manufacturing or process plant, you have a plan for your day when you arrive in the morning. As soon as you walk through the gate, you are hit with the equipment failures from the night before.
You immediately spring into action to help find parts, drawings, millwrights, fitters, and anything else needed to repair the equipment as quickly as possible. Once that is underway, you are told to compile that urgent report for corporate, which is required immediately. And who can forget the countless meetings that must have your attendance?
The next thing you know, it is 7:00 PM, and you have done nothing from your day’s plan. Sound familiar?
This is pretty typical in a busy plant environment. There is always more work to do than hours in the day. Unfortunately, the reactive work is the work that gets the highest priority.
If you have a critical piece of equipment down, you are not likely to run that PM or work with a team on the RCM project. The fact is, reactive work is always seen as more urgent than proactive work. Reactive work must be done NOW, while proactive work can always be pushed to another day.
The problem is that working on reactive work never really moves us forward. At best, we are maintaining the status quo. So, how do we make proactive work a priority with all the reactive work we are required to do?
While there is no simple answer to this question, there are some practical strategies you can employ to help. Step 1 is to gain organizational consensus that reactive work does not improve the status quo and that only proactive work will drive improvement and productivity. The next step is determining what proactive activities can help improve the facility.
A variety of proactive strategies could be employed to drive improvement. There are too many to name in this short article. However, some of the most practical ones that come to mind are:
Develop Equipment Strategies (Strategize)
- Define Critical Systems
- Determine Failure Modes
- Determine Risks (probability x consequence)
- Develop mitigating actions for risks
Work Management (Execute)
- Work Identification (e.g. operator rounds)
- Prioritize the work (includes preventive, predictive, and other failure findings activities)
- Plan
- Schedule
- Execute
- Document and Follow-up
Failure Elimination (Evaluate)
- Identify Repetitive Failures
- Prioritize by Impact to the Facility
- Perform Root Cause Analysis (RCA)
- Ensure Corrective Actions are Implemented
- Modify and Enhance Equipment Strategies
I think of this as Strategize, Execute, and Evaluate. Build a strategy for your equipment, execute it, and then evaluate its effectiveness. For this to work, it must have a foundation of support from senior and plant management.
This means that leadership has committed to dedicating some of the plant’s limited resources to proactive efforts. People must have defined roles and responsibilities and the training and tools necessary to perform proactive work.
I am not suggesting that every plant resource needs to be dedicated to this effort. That is not practical, and it will not work. However, we can devote just a few key resources to driving these efforts. We do not pull these resources to fix the “failure of the day.”
These dedicated resources will, over time, slow the vicious cycle of reaction and ultimately begin the virtuous cycle of proaction. Each proactive activity will build upon the last, creating more time and resources previously inundated with reactive work.
I cannot stress enough the importance of making proactive work PRACTICAL. If the work is not practical, it simply will not be accepted in the day-to-day activities of the plant. Think of this transition from reaction to proaction as evolution rather than revolution. Be patient and persistent because reaction is a tough habit to break!
But in the long run, the rewards far outweigh the investment. Reliability is one of the few investments you can make to positively impact every aspect of a facility—safety, environmental, cost, availability, employee engagement, and EBITDA.
Ken Latino is currently the Managing Director of Prelical Solutions, LLC. He has extensive Maintenance and Reliability experience in both continuous process and batch manufacturing plants. His work while at Meridium, WestRock and GE has helped large asset intensive companies to get increased production rates and reduced maintenance costs while improving safety and environmental performance. Ken has an extensive background in Root Cause Analysis (RCA), Reliability Improvement Work Processes, Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and a host of other areas of Asset Performance Management (APM). He also have a strong background in the use of SAP EAM/GE Digital (Meridium) APM and have developed enterprise level work processes and tools to improve asset performance. These tools and work processes include tank integrity management, motor management, RCA, paper machine roll management and history, maintenance budget forecasting and analysis and many others. Email: [email protected]
