(14a) Back to Basics

In a large part of industry, the trend is to migrate towards the latest and greatest technologies in an effort to make Maintenance organizations more efficient. Unfortunately, many maintenance organizations are relatively ineffective at delivering a proper balance of maintenance activities, primarily those aimed at identifying impending failure to allow for timely corrective actions. The truth is, “tools (technology) enable and ineffective organization to be more efficient at being ineffective.” We need to re-shape the content (solution) then apply the best tools (technology) to achieve:

The Right Maintenance on the Right Assets at the Right Time.

In many cases maintenance systems are over-burdened with OEM requirements, knee-jerk inspections instituted as a result of a major failure, or simply growth due to inefficiencies. The organization begins to lose sight of what they are trying to achieve and thus become very reactionary to asset behavior. By getting back to the fundamental basics of what is the relative importance of the assets (Right Assets), what actually fails, what should be done to restore or maintain the inherent reliability (Right Maintenance), and at what frequency should those actions be accomplished (Right Time), a Maintenance Organization can become more effective and then more efficient through the use of the latest technologies.

This presentation is a high level look at how industry can re-set the basics to become a Best Practices organization by doing the following:

• Establish a current picture of the organization as a starting point
• Develop a plan and implement strategy
• Prioritize organic assets
• Re-define maintenance requirements
• Re-allocate personnel resources
• Deploy or re-deploy tools (technology/software)
• Measure success
• Continuously improve

Benefits

Unlike capital expenditures that have a 1 or 2 year payback, investing in getting back to the basics can have a 2:1 to as much as 7:1 return in the first year alone. This is due primarily to the fact that you are now doing things differently. Your entire maintenance organization is part of the solution. People are looking for further areas of improvement based on this new critical thinking. The major effect of this approach is reduction of your Operations and Maintenance (O&M) budget. This is where the rubber hits the road. The sooner an organization starts, the sooner they save in the current year.

Summary

Change is inevitable and without a plan/process to manage that change, culture change will be impossible. The real gain in instituting programmatic change results, is not with the short-term gains of low-hanging fruit, but with the long-term gains of changing the way the organization approaches and deals with this thing called Maintenance. Getting “Back to Basics” is a first step along the way.