Things to Think About and Do in 2011: Success

Here is this week's installment of ReliabilityWeb.com's e-book, Things to Think About and Do in 2011. Can't wait for next week's topic? Thumb through the entire e-book for free at ReliabilityWeb.com, Happy Reading!

Success

Success is something we all strive for but seldom take the time to fully understand. Few think about why things go right because they are so busy dealing with all of the equipment, policy and processes that are going wrong.

Many of the solutions to our failures lie in our successes. The study of success, or positive deviance, as it is called, has been used to solve malnutrition and famine in foreign countries, political turmoil during wars, and even pump failures in manufacturing plants.

The Root Cause of Success (RCS) is simply a process that includes using your existing root cause tools to better understand why your processes and equipment work reliably.

For example, if you have a bank of seven pumps within your facility and five of the seven have never dialed, then ask yourself why. What is different about these successful pumps? When you look into the success factors for the five reliable pumps, you may discover any or all of the following: proper alignment, correct initial assembly, proper mounting, correct up and downstream piping, etc.

These findings can then be leveraged across the remaining, less reliable pumps, increasing their productivity and your plant up-time.

If your plant has created a culture where is where it is OK to use failure investigations to blame or punish folks within the facility, then applying RCS may help get your program back on track. Using this method, you can focus on the positive, solve problems, reward good behavior, and change the culture.

For 2011, consider your success. Take the time to use your root cause tools to analyze your good fortune. What have been your enablers? Leverage them and enjoy your 2011. 

—Shon Isenhour

Things to Think About and Do in 2011: Excellence

Here is this week's installment of ReliabilityWeb.com's e-book, Things to Think About and Do in 2011. Can't wait for next week's topic? Thumb through the entire e-book for free at ReliabilityWeb.com, Happy Reading!

Excellence

What is excellence? To many maintenance reliability professionals, excellence is completing more than 85 percent of work planned, compliance with over 90 percent of the schedule and completing at least 95 percent of the PM. But ask yourself if that definition is shared in the ivory towers of your organization? If not, what is the boss’s definition of excellence? If you want to be considered a valued contributor with job security, shouldn’t you know?

We can argue about the definition of value. However, in the corner offices of corporate management, value has only one meaning: dollars! If it can’t be monetized or show up on a profit and loss statement, it doesn’t have value. Returning to the original question, do planned work, schedule compliance and PM completion have monetary value? They probably do, but try to convince a financial executive, who is under extreme profit pressure from a board of directors and shareholders. The vision isn’t there.

In order to thrive, we must reorient out thinking to conform to that of corporate chieftains. They certainly aren’t going to reorient their thinking to us. What does that mean? First, we must be recognized as fulfilling a vital role by producing demonstrable business values within operational excellence. If you don’t know what operational excellence is, you’d better find out, because your masters of industry are probably thinking about implementation! Second, we must shift our sights to results that can be shown to have real monetary value instead of measures that may generate all the excitement of the flu in the stratosphere of your company:

1. Focusing on declining lifetime cost and failure rates—rather than on PdM, PM and work effectiveness
2. Achieving optimal system availability—rather than equipment MTBF
3. Showing the percentage of RCA recommendations that succeeded in preventing subsequent events—rather than analyses completed

Let’s measure and publicize the results of objectives that create business value, not activities that got you there!

—John Mitchell