A maintenance weight loss program.

Conceptually, losing weight is a matter of eating less and exercising more. However, most attempts usually fail and we often gain weight. Similarly, healthy maintenance practices are very basic. Yet again, most organizations fail to apply them successfully. Success or failure with a weight loss plan has many elements in common with the application of sound maintenance principles and may help us avoid some common traps and failures.

MAINTENANCE AND WEIGHT LOSS

Most of us want to lose weight several times over the course of a lifetime. The usual pattern is to reduce caloric intake (eat less), increase our overall metabolic level (exercise more), or a combination of both. We further vow to stick to our plan (discipline). Together, these principles represent the weight loss concept: eat less, exercise more, and be disciplined about it!

Just as simple as the concept for weight loss is the concept of good maintenance. We must prevent maintenance problems from occurring (exercise). We must identify problems early (eat less) and we must plan our work and work our plan (be disciplined). Still, many plants struggle with adhering to sound, simple maintenance practices.

WHY WE FAIL

The statistics are cruel; 95% of weight loss efforts based on dieting alone fail within 3-5 years. While I cannot produce statistics for maintenance, common sense tells me that they would be similar.

Among the most common causes cited for failure are the following:

* Reliance on only one measure.

* Making temporary changes but failing to address the long-term behavior that produced the present condition.

* Overcomplicating the plan to change.

* Failure to recognize or correct a resource balance or attitude that leads to the current problem.

* Over-reliance on technology or a "silver bullet."

* Trying to do it on your own.

Even after scrutinizing this list, it would be hard to find an item that did not apply to both maintenance improvement and weight loss success. While there are hundreds of ways to go about improvement, there are several important junctions and turns you should not miss on the road to sound maintenance and weight loss practices. Let's look at them in turn.

RECOGNIZE THE NEED

First and foremost, we must recognize collectively as an organization that we are overweight. Denial is the first obstacle. It is time to acknowledge that our trousers are not shrinking slightly in every wash. Too many times have I wondered about the preventive maintenance actions prompting crafts people to do "on-the-run" inspections of belts and couplings better guarded and more inaccessible than Fort Knox. At the same time the plant's management and craftspeople indignantly defend their preventive maintenance program as "very good" or "better than most others."

Such attitudes and misconceptions often run very deep. Many plants remain resistant even after you tell them that preventive maintenance has a return on investment of 100% to 1000%, or that an effective planner can be as productive as five craftspeople. In such situations, I feel like I am standing on a busy street corner in New York City trying vigorously to give away perfectly good $100 bills, without success.

VISION, MISSION, AND GOALS

The weight problem may be absolutely clear in your mind, but make sure that you have significant support within management and frontline layers of the organization before your continue. It is hard to slug it out alone. Try to be the spark plug instead of the piston! Many organizations succeed by taking key people in management and the front line on "discovery visits" to other organizations. After your organization has acknowledged the need and completed self-examination, you are part of the way toward the second step. Quantify your gap and establish a vision, a future state that you will always want to reach for.

Most of us could not imagine a weight loss program without a scale to know when we have reached our goal. Yet many plants and plant managers embark on maintenance improvement without having defined good maintenance. This goes to the core of the matter. If we do not know how to define good maintenance, how will we know when we reach it?

Another challenge with missions, visions, and goals is making them all as public as possible. It is much easier to renege on your weight loss plan privately than in front of your friends, family, or colleagues. Communicate with and involve people around you. Then, if your coworkers see you popping those chocolate bars and sodas all day, they are much more likely to put a lock on the refrigerator and help you succeed. Broad involvement will also provide a reality check for your planning.

KEY SUCCESS PROXIES

At this juncture, you have a mission and a crew that is inspired, aware, and ready to go. The next step is to identify success proxies (the power or authority to act for another). Proxies are the processes, procedures, or actions that drive the organization's targeted results. For people following the famous Atkins diet, abstaining from sugar and staying away from carbohydrate-rich foods such as pasta, rice, and bread are success proxies.

Maintenance success proxies are qualified best practices, such as precision alignment and dynamic balancing for all rotating elements, filtering lubricants, conducting root cause problem elimination, and planning all work before it is scheduled. When you identify success proxies for craftspeople, you soon see that some relate to documentation and management, others to execution and follow up. All layers of the organization are thus engaged in meaningful activities that directly act for another. These measures typically describe output, quality, and cost. Think of proxy drivers as value-added activities on steroids.

An excellent way for an organization to identify success proxies is through a detailed best practices audit. There are many organizations providing such services to industry. The outcome of such an assessment will be a comprehensive mapping of best practices organized by process, craft skills, organizational area, or similar.

Sometimes, but not always, it will also identify associated metrics for each practice. Basing your improvement plan on a detailed best practice map yields other benefits, too. First, your plan will be relevant and close to the people who must make the changes--craftspeople, operators, and supervisors. Second, you are specifying what needs to be done, yet leaving room for the frontline to use their trade skills to decide how to best accomplish it. Third, by comparing best practices with actual practices, you automatically identify and can correct the long-term reasons that brought about the current problems. Finally, you are making your improvements on a broad base, thus ensuring better resilience against failure, allowing all people to contribute their strengths while recognizing good practices already in place.

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Some people ague that you can map your processes internally instead of hiring an external consultant. They are right! A couple words of caution, though. It takes persistence and time to identify, define, and benchmark best practices. If you benchmark your maintenance function alone or as a small group, arm yourself with plenty of time and initiative, then pray that your superiors have the vision and patience to see you through. If you were trying to lose weight, would you start by rewriting the nutritional or exercise guide?

What you need is a comprehensive audit providing a richly detailed, honest comparison of where you are and where you could be. We have often seen internal audits scoring themselves twice as high as the independent outsider would. Figure 1 shows a section of an audit document for part of the process of planning and scheduling. The right side shows where you are, the left where you could be. (Please contact me if you need a more detailed sample and description of this document.)

SUCCESS PROXIES METRICS

By definition, if you focus on doing the right things, weight loss and good maintenance results will follow. The next step is using metrics based on success proxies to track performance. The percent completion of established preventive maintenance rounds and percent of rotating equipment aligned and balanced to specs feels more relevant to a journeyman than does the overall equipment efficiency (OEE). Likewise, the net amount of carbohydrates and calories you have consumed and burned feels like a more relevant day-to-day measure to the dieter than does the ultimate and distant goal of "x" pounds of weight loss. For the Atkins dieter, the performance measure is to have a maximum of 20 quality carbs per day. In the plant, your challenge is to build a hierarchy of relevant indicators reflecting the work that drives your organization toward success.

The discipline of sales management has long used the concepts of success proxies and their associated metrics to create sales forecasts and measure progress. For example, it may take an average of 10 "cold calls" to make a sale worth US$ 8000, on average, 8 weeks after the call. Therefore, to sell US$ 100,000 in a month, we need to make 130 cold calls 8 weeks before we can close 13 sales of US$ 8000 each.

Figure 2 is a simple model focusing the organization on the right processes instead of the end result. It contains all the essential elements of maintenance and illustrates how they interact. The focus must be on the success proxies--things you can affect hour-by-hour during your day. When you do these things right, record production will follow.

REVIEW AND FINE TUNE

After selecting the appropriate success proxies and associated metrics for your plan, schedule several reviews to fine tune your plan and redistribute resources as needed. Also, make sure that you plan for the long term. Our weight gain and the current status of our plant developed over a long time, so the solution must also be long term. If you think of this as a "project," you set yourself up for failure since, by definition, a project has a defined end. What you need above everything is long-term, sustainable change--a process and a new way of living. I hope the advice and information shared in this article will help you, whether you are seeking to improve your maintenance or reduce your weight!

BEST PRACTICES                          ACTUAL MILL PRACTICES

III. Backlog                            III. Backlog Score 50

Backlog Documentation                   Backlog Documentation
12. Documented definitions and backlog  12 Backlog management processes
    work process flow are available        are not documented well. Nor
    and well disseminated.                 are they widely available or
                                           understood by maintenance
                                           craftspeople or managers.

Backlog Execution                       Backlog Execution
13. Work order backlog is reviewed      13 The plant does review the
    jointly by operations and              backlog jointly in all areas.
    maintenance throughout the plant.   14 The CMMS system has many
14. Backlog is categorized by area,        sorting capabilities, but few
    skills, hold codes, daily/weekly       areas use the management
    and shut-down/ outage.                 tools available in CMMS to
                                           sort the backlog.
15. Backlog is reviewed weekly by       15 The backlog is reviewed
    Operations and Maintenance:            weekly by operations and
    * By skills/crafts or as               maintenance. The backlog is
      appropriate to the organization      not always sorted by age and
    * By age                               the correct priority but the
16. Work orders statuses (in backlogs)     plant does a good job of
    are updated automatically when         reviewing work orders. Many
    parts arrive for "awaiting parts"      work orders in the backlog
    status work orders.                    are unplanned, which prevents
                                           thorough review.
                                        16 Though the CMMS does have
                                           this capability, it is not
                                           used.

Figure 1. Extract from a best practices document showing planning and
scheduling, backlog documentation, and execution. The left side shows
best practice, the right, actual mill practice.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

* The similarities between maintenance and weight loss programs.

* Establishing vision, mission and goals.

* How to review and fine tune your maintenance program.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

* "Reliability and Maintenance Management," a bi-monthly column in Solutions! by Christer Idhammar.

* Reliability and Maintenance Track. Go to www.papersummit.org and click on Educational Programs.

Author's note: Please feel free to contact me regarding this article, I do enjoy the feedback whether you agree or disagree.

MICHAEL LIPPIG, IDCON INC.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Michael Lippig is business development manager and consultant for IDCON Inc. Email Michael at: [e-mail]

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