Six maintenance myths.

I am often asked this question: "What are the most common opportunities to improve production through maintenance management?" My first answer is that mills should execute basic maintenance practices better. To be successful, mills must break the myths that exist in their organizations. Some of the myths will be addressed in this article. You may find that these maintenance myths are uncomfortably close to describing how your mill operates.

MYTH 1: PEOPLE ARE OUR BIGGEST ASSET

If you work in plant management or as a corporate officer, it is politically correct to say "people are our biggest asset". Most managers would agree to that statement. I don't agree! People are not a company's biggest asset--the right people are a company's biggest asset, and the wrong people are liabilities.

I confirmed this opinion during a recent seminar for a group of supervisors and craftspeople. One of the discussions started with the question, "Isn't it true, that if any given crew in this plant would lose their poorest performing people (about 10% to 20% of the total), the loss would hardly be noticed?"

After the laughs and pointing had subsided, several people confirmed that there were always a number of people in any given crew that had "never accomplished an honest day work." These people destroy morale, and in some cases even slow the rest of the crew down.

Management must deal with underperforming people. If you have a decent relationship with your union or your non-union workforce, they are usually receptive to discussing these matters. Poor performers are a big problem for them as well. It is also true that people cannot be more effective than the system in which they work allows them to be. Management can minimize the amount of wasted time and energy by implementing good maintenance and reliability processes.

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MYTH 2: WE CAN'T MOTIVATE MAINTENANCE CRAFTSPEOPLE TO IMPROVE RELIABILITY BECAUSE THEY MAKE MORE MONEY WHEN THINGS BREAK DOWN

Maintenance people typically do make more money when things break down. A perceived "Catch 22" by maintenance management is that crews can't be motivated to improve reliability and maintenance because higher equipment reliability will reduce the amount of overtime.

However, the answer to the question goes back to Myth 1 above. Only a minor percentage of people don't contribute as well as others; the rest of us want to be good performers. The key word is pride. Pride matters more than overtime pay. Pride drives a relatively low-paid U.S. Marine to risk his or her life for months at the time. Pride drives a maintenance craftsperson to spend an extra hour or two to align a pump to one thousandth of an inch even though few will notice.

Management can instill pride in an organization by developing clear expectations for reliability and maintenance, and by training and supporting people long term in achieving these expectations.

For example, develop a clear definition of preventive maintenance and develop an action plan and training initiatives on how to improve inspection routes, lubrication, cleaning practices, operating procedures, alignment, and other preventive maintenance practices.

Since money also is a motivator, provide incentive pay for equipment reliability. One of the fastest preventive maintenance program setups we have seen was at a car manufacturing plant in Europe that offered its crews (operations and maintenance) a bonus on each percentage over 97% line efficiency. The results appeared on reports just weeks after the announcement--the actual equipment reliability improvement probably started hours after the announcement.

MYTH 3: PEOPLE DON'T LIKE CHANGE AND WILL RESIST IT

I often hear that people don't like change. In my experience, people love change--they just don't want to be changed by someone else. People are often very receptive to change as long as they are part of the change process. The problem is that when a project improvement plan goes through the usual number crunching, the involvement of people is often forgotten.

For example, people in the plant typically can identify planning and scheduling improvement opportunities. Yet most of us are reactive by nature; we don't want to work to strict guidelines, such as plan and schedule exactly what to do three days from now. Improving planning and scheduling requires a culture change together with detailed, agreed upon processes and procedures. Even though we know this, plants sometimes try to improve planning and scheduling by talking over a cup of coffee, or at best sending a couple of planners on a two-day planning and scheduling course.

Production and operation changes are often 80% to 90% dependent on technical solutions including process automation. An equipment reliability and maintenance change initiative is 95% dependent on changing people's behavior.

Management must address the issues of involvement and acceptance while encouraging the few enthusiastic souls in a project. Project success can be expressed as R=Q X A X E (Results = Quality of actions X Acceptance for change X Enthusiasm for change).

MYTH 4: NEW COMPUTER SOFTWARE (CMMS) WILL IMPROVE RELIABILITY AND MAINTENANCE PERFORMANCE

It is not unusual to see a maintenance organization implement a new Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) with the hopes that this new computer software will improve plant reliability. In truth, new software can be a great help, but it is only a tool.

If plant performance improves following a software change, it is not the software itself that contributes the majority of improvements. Improvements will be a synthesis of the implementation and execution of better work processes, behavior changes, and higher quality data from the software. The obvious question then becomes, "Can't the plant improve work processes, behaviors, and data quality with the old CMMS?"

Maintenance software updates sometimes become so cumbersome that a plant disregards obvious fundamentals due to work overload. For example, the bill of material for equipment isn't always up to date in the old system, and it will not be up to date in the new system unless an effort is made to improve the data. It is a common argument that it costs too much to update the bill of materials, yet we accept the cost of having each craftsperson use a significant amount of time every day looking for parts.

In some plants, training is reduced to a minimum and often performed several months before the system is put in use. The result is that, at best, about 30% of the CMMS functionality is used and that only 30% of the people know how to use it effectively. This results in a 9% usage of the system.

If your organization is ready to implement a new CMMS, make sure you update the bill of materials, standard job plans, equipment numbering, and asset numbering in the old system.

Also, ask yourself if you plan and schedule jobs well today. If not, the problem is usually not the software. People will blame the software because it can't talk back, but the real problems are lack of discipline in backlog management, prioritization issues, and the inability of operations and maintenance to coordinate production and maintenance schedules.

MYTH 5: HAVING MORE MAINTENANCE PEOPLE ON SHIFT REDUCES DOWNTIME 

If you have many problems in your plant, operations typically requests more people on shift to fix the breakdowns during shift. If this is the situation in your plant, you are going down the wrong path.

If you have a multitude of problems in your plant, you need to find out why and fix the source of the problems. What is the solution for your plant?

Most likely you don't have enough time to repair all equipment problems found in your area, and you don't always find the problems before a breakdown. So we need more people, right? In the short run possibly, but not necessarily, and definitely not in the long run. Here is a checklist of possible problems.

* Do operators perform detailed equipment inspections? If not, make sure operators know how to inspect a bearing, a motor, a coupling, a hydraulic motor, a fluid coupling, etc.

* Do your maintenance people have detailed inspection lists, take readings, and analyze trends in order to identify symptoms on equipment? If not, work on those issues.

* Do you use your craftspeople by having well-planned jobs for them? Do you schedule maintenance jobs well in coordination with operations? By executing high quality inspections, we can make sure we know about most symptoms, and through better planning and scheduling the symptoms can be corrected efficiently. This is basic theory, but do you actually do it in your plant?

If inspections by operations and maintenance are improved along with planning and scheduling, craftspeople will be better utilized, reducing the need for maintenance people on shift.

MYTH 6: WE MUST CLASSIFY OUR DOWNTIME AND PROBLEMS BY DEPARTMENT

In most plants, downtime and problems are classified by department. Classifying problems by department contributes to the following effects in the mill:

* It drives a serious wedge between mill departments.

* It encourages "witch hunts" and other political games.

* People spend time creating useless data.

* We provide a skewed picture of mill performance to accounting and corporate management.

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* We focus more on who is to blame instead of asking why problems occur and prioritizing their elimination rapidly and effectively.

You may say, "but we need this department-by-department report to find out where we have problems." My reply is, you do not need the report because the report does not give you that information.

I attended the morning meeting during a recent plant visit. Someone announced that a motor had been tripping "all night." Since it involved a motor, the problem was swiftly classified as an electrical problem and the E & I department got two hours of downtime etched into its history.

I joined the electrician who researched the problem and he told me before we even looked at the motor, "It's not an electrical problem; it's Joe (not his real name) who has been frequently stopping and starting the motor and running it with too high density of the media." He was right. The report will, of course, never be corrected. The electrician didn't want to put Joe in a bad spot.

We need to change our morning meeting "witch hunt" tradition from asking who, to asking why. It can be done by classifying failures by component type, equipment number, and symptom--not by department.

If a true root cause analysis reveals that part of the problem is that a person or department made a mistake, management must deal with the situation. Guessing and finger pointing without knowing the true cause doesn't help reliability and maintenance performance.

I hope this article raised some interesting thoughts for your mill. For more articles along the same line, please visit our article archive at www.idcon.com.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN:

* The biggest myths in maintenance and how they contribute to poor performance.

* Creative ways to work around the negative effects of these myths.

* Opportunities for true improvement in reliability and maintenance.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

* "A driving lesson for operations and maintenance," by Tor Idhammar and Michael Lippig, Solutions!, January 2004. Product Code: 04JANSO05 (Enter product code in search engine on www.tappi.org).

* "Is your company a maintenance 'hedgehog' or a 'fox?'", by Christer Idhammar, Solutions!, May 2004. Product Code: 04MAYSO72.

* Pulp and Paper Reliability and Maintenance Conference, October 18-21, 2004, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Go to http://www.pprm.net.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Pulp and Paper Reliability and Maintenance Conference (PPRM) will be held October 18-21, 2004 at the Omni Hotel, CNN Center, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The PPRM conference focuses on reliability and maintenance "know-how" in the areas of maintenance management. For more information go to www.pprm.net.

TOR IDHAMMAR, IDCON

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Tor Idhammar is a partner and vice president for IDCON Inc. Email him at: [e-mail].

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