In poorly performing mills it is typical that production, maintenance and engineering organizations work in silos without much cooperation.
The traditional view in these mills is that the maintenance organization delivers service to its customer which is the production organization and the engineering organization is called “the black hole” where requests for drawing and other documentation updates disappear, and maintenance and operations input on design are not included when new equipment is specified and procured.
This traditional view has never made sense to me because the results of maintenance work are not service. Services are the resources the organization has to deliver equipment reliability and asset preservation.
One common observation in best manufacturing organizations is that Operations, Maintenance and Engineering work in a close partnership.
They view Reliable production as their common goal. The Maintenance organization delivers Equipment Reliability; The Operations organization delivers Process Reliability in an equal partnership and the Engineering organization design and procure equipment based on lowest Life Cycle Cost (LCC) instead of lowest purchase price.
LCC includes total cost of ownership for acquisition, installation, operations and maintenance, energy, scrapping etc.
Reliability and Maintainability requirements are included in early specifications with involvement from the operations and maintenance organizations.
All organizations I talk with about the principles of a partnership work system agree but seldom implement the changes aggressively enough to harvest the benefits. Most organizations are under the illusion that they already work as partners and therefore do nothing to implement it.
Today pulp and paper mills can not afford not to implement a partnership work system, the saving opportunities are too big to be ignored and the decision to implement a partnership work system has to come from the mill manager or above him/her. The rest of the organization is often gridlocked and protective of their old roles.
The table below summarizes some maintenance related differences between traditional service focused organizations and organizations based on a partnership work system driven by reliability performance.
|
Constituent |
Service Focused |
Partnership Work |
Comments |
| Key Performance Indicator | Maintenance Cost/ton | Prime Quality Tons/Manufacturing Cost | Drives the organization to focus on competitiveness and total results. The focus must be on what drives cost, not cost alone. |
| Engineering | Specification and procurement of new equipment done without reliability and maintainability specifications and enough involvement by users. Procurement primarily based on lowest cost to acquire. | Procurement based on lowest Life Cycle Cost. Specifications include reliability and maintainability requirements. | To be successful investments must change from short term cost focus to long term total cost of ownership. Privately held companies can be more successful to implement this strategy than public companies. |
| Reliability | Seen as a maintenance responsibility and deals with equipment only. Sometimes related solely to predictive maintenance. | Reliability is the total performance measurement for the whole organization. Encompasses process and equipment reliability. | Improved manufacturing reliability drives down cost. One common performance indicator helps build the partnership work system. |
| Production Reports | Documents lost production per department. E.g. Mechanical Maintenance, Electrical, Instrumentation and Operations. | Describes the problem, selects problems to be solved, assign problem owner, eliminates the problem and train rest of organization in solution. | A change from asking who? To asking Why? strengthen partnership work practices. |
| Root Cause Analysis | Often called Failure Analysis. | Called Problem Elimination | The term “Failure” often relates to equipment and thus maintenance. The term “Problem” includes everything and supports the partnership work practices. |
| Flexibility | Operators operate and maintenance people maintain. | As a minimum operators do basic inspections of equipment and process. They are trained in how to do inspections. | Operators can often do 50% of all basic equipment inspections. This will significantly lower costs for preventive maintenance. It is the first step towards expanded operator and maintenance work flexibility. |
| Priorities of Maintenance work | Priorities are decided by the requestor which often represents the operations organization. Priorities are often emotional. | A priority guideline is agreed upon and respected by both operations and maintenance. | The most common reason why planners do not plan is frequent interruptions by emotional priorities. A service focused maintenance organization will encourage a “Yes Sir” mentality. In a partnership the priorities will be set on basis of what is most important for the whole organization. |
| Planning and Scheduling. -Shutdown work. | Maintenance and Operations work scheduled in separate schedules. Schedules can easily be changed. | One schedule for all work. Schedule changes are done jointly between operations and maintenance. Shut down project manager represents operations. | A partnership will easier overcome old and very costly practices. Improves reliability and Production throughput. |
| Planning and Scheduling. – Daily work. | Work frequently added to schedule in the morning of the day it is requested to be done. This practice is accepted by maintenance because operations is the customer. | Schedule for next days work is closed at 11.00 a.m. day before execution. Work is assigned to crafts people end of day before execution of schedule. Less than 5% changes in schedules. | Drives a change in behavior. Increases maintenance productivity. |
| Maintenance cost Responsibility. | Operations request 70% of work. Maintenance manager is blamed For budget over runs. | Joint responsibility for Manufacturing costs. | Drives partnership work practices |
| Maintenance craft People on shift. | Many people on shift to cover For possible break downs. Craft People often poorly utilized. | Very few or no maintenance craft people on shift. | Fewer maintenance craft people on shift will result in more maintenance work done by operators. |
Implementation
First of all your mill manager must believe that to implement partnership work practices is the right thing to do because it improves the mills’ competitiveness and you can not afford not to do it.
It is imperative to understand that the change to partnership practices is not a revolution it is more of an evolution through implementation of a lot of common sense. So it does not need to take long time and it does not cost a lot of capital dollars.
Recommended implementation steps
If most of what you have read in this article makes sense you need to sell these ideas to key people in your organization.
Often you can speed up this process by assemble operations, maintenance and engineering to present and discuss these ideas. Because the principles are common sense there is a very good chance that acceptance will be very high.
Mission statement
It will help you to first agree on a joint mission statement between operations and maintenance for your production organization. Key operations and maintenance leaders must together work out this statement.
You can start by listing some key words that should be included in statement E.g. Reliable Production, Safety, Partnership. Split up in a couple of groups to work out the statement. Review the statements you come up with a couple of times and you will most probably come up with a mission statement you all agree to. An example could be;
“In a partnership between operations and maintenance we shall safely deliver continuously improved production reliability through long term implementation of best practices”
Belief.
Improved production reliability will decrease manufacturing costs.
The mission statements for maintenance and operations must be tied with the above statement. For the maintenance organization the mission statement could say;
As an equal partner with operations we shall safely deliver continuously improved equipment reliability through long term implementation of best practices”
Belief.
Improved equipment reliability will decrease maintenance costs.
The application and true use of this statement will drive very different work practices than if the statement would say as following actual statement from a maintenance organization;
“As a service organization to production we will safely provide effective services at lowest cost.”
This organization became very cost driven. The maintenance manager focused on cutting the cost of maintenance over many years. He had done exactly what was asked by his manager and followed the mission statement.
The easiest way to cut maintenance costs is to defer maintenance work and that was what he did, so after two years maintenance costs started to go up drastically and reliability was decreasing so he was fired.
What good look like and how good your organization is
You might also want to do a structured educational evaluation of your maintenance performance in order to increase awareness and to let your organization discover the gap between best practices and your actual practices.
This evaluation should describe your new work practices in such a way that improvements, or the lack thereof, can be measured.
