Things to Think About and Do in 2011: Excellence

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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