One of the first responsibilities of leadership is to provide a simple, clear view of what the future can and should look like. Tracking and reporting on key metrics lets you focus squarely on the behavior changes you want.Ĭreate a clear, concise vision. Or conversely, what doesn’t get measured never will be improved. Use the right predictive maintenance metrics. This article discusses sample business practices that must be implemented to improve overall plant reliability. Operating practices are a vital part of any preventive maintenance program. One of the most important actions of maintenance and reliability leadership is to expect and set the environment to allow the entire organization to practice “Good Enough Never Is” every day. In a maintenance improvement process, there are several areas where there is always a desire or undercurrent to shortcut the process. It contains the vital information you need to design, develop and engineer your maintenance program from the ground up. Despite what you may have heard, the foundation of a successful reliability program is a list – a detailed, accurate equipment list ideally recorded in your CMMS software. The preventive maintenance team at American Axle and Manufacturing addressed an issue found during a routine preventive maintenance work order using multiple condition monitoring tools.īuild a detailed and accurate equipment list. With the right leadership in the right areas pushing the right things, you have success.Įmploy a multi-tool approach for more savings. Corporate reliability leaders say that if they could do it over again, they’d spend more time choosing the right people for key leadership positions. A job estimated to take five labor hours might take as many as 10 hours or as few as two. Experience shows that the best labor estimates are routinely off as much as 100 percent. There is little to no payback from using one or two condition- monitoring technologies – or applying CBM to a small amount of your assets and hoping it will evolve into a successful program. Go all-in with condition-based monitoring. Another 30 percent of these activities could be replaced with condition-monitoring technologies and a predictive maintenance approach. On average, 30 percent of all preventive maintenance activities do not add value and should be eliminated. If you talk “reliability” but pay and recognize for failure, guess what you’ll get? What gets rewarded gets done, period. But people don’t pay attention to what you say they pay attention to what you do. Managers can talk all day about the organization’s desire to be proactive, improve reliability, reduce costs, etc. Do you listen to your motors complaining about overload? Do you see your pump packings crying a flood? Do you hear your bearings whine about contaminated lubricants? Do you notice your steam system coughing excessive condensate and complaining about strained elbows? what makes the difference between an ordinary maintenance plan and a good, effective preventive maintenance program. But creating a comprehensive maintenance program that is effective poses some interesting challenges. Creating a maintenance plan is generally not difficult to do. If an organization is serious about a closer integration between departments, the rewards systems must be designed to drive everybody’s actions and performance toward the same goal and rewards.Ĭonstruct your maintenance plan. Use joint reward systems to drive results. Many organizations spend too much time searching for new reliability and maintenance concepts, and very little time on implementing and improving what they just started. Using a well-planned approach involving all employees, equipment reliability will have a direct, positive impact on your bottom line. Without the ownership of your equipment in the operator’s hands, it’s difficult to be reliable. With effective planning, work can be completed with the least interruption to operations and the most efficient use of maintenance resources.Ĭonsider an operator-driven reliability program. Using metrics and KPIs, maintenance organizations can efficiently manage maintenance activities and focus improvement initiatives on driving value.Įmploy maintenance planning and scheduling. Without this leadership focus for your maintenance program, nothing else matters. Be sure your organization understands these important elements and the impact they have on performance – starting at the very top. Learn the 12 elements of effective reliability management. Are you ready to take your reliability program to the next level? Here are 50 ideas to get you started: Today, top organizations are reaping the benefits from implementing well-designed and managed reliability programs. When a maintenance program is successful, every area of the company is positively affected.