The Death of Reliability: Is it Too Late to Resurrect the Last, True Competitive Advantage?. Nathan C. Wright
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leaders preach Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) as the pinnacle of maintenance, because it is such only in an unqualified reliability professional’s mind. Again, this is proof of what I am saying in this book. There is no shortcut, quick fix, or wonder drug to fix reliability. It is as simple as hard work and qualified leadership. You will find yourself throughout this book either agreeing or disagreeing with me, but the bottom line is I challenge you to really look at why you disagree with me; it is probably because this hits too close to home.
There are no shortcuts or one-size-fits-all programs. Consultants cannot get you there. Shortcuts and consultants will devour your money and waste your time. Look within your organization for leaders and develop them to achieve results. If you do not have a reliability professional in your organization, then hire one and invest your time and money in success.
TRAINING VS. DEVELOPMENT
Another favorite tool of organizational leaders today in the hunt for competitive advantage is the misguided training efforts of their leaders. Organizations have spent billions each year attempting to train their leaders. They reference Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great, in many of these training sessions. Several of these organizations will make reading this book mandatory in the hope that the information contained within will magically transform their leaders into those responsible for the success of the eleven companies in Jim’s book. “Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so few entities that become great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have a great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.” To give a business the best opportunity to succeed, leaders should be chosen for a role based on their natural ability to flourish in that role. After they are selected, leaders should be given opportunities to develop and grow in ways that will help them meet the requirements of their respective roles. This tailored approach diminishes the desire to provide ineffective, “one-size-fits-all” training and allows the leaders to concentrate on the areas that will make them and their organizations most successful.
If every organization is in hot pursuit of a competitive advantage, how do you find the real deal? Like I stated at the beginning, in my experience I have encountered all the different approaches in this endeavor. It is my goal in this book to share these experiences and assist you in your pursuit of competitive advantage and ultimately show you the untouched opportunity still available to every organization. Many organizations believe, falsely, that they have identified this opportunity but fail to truly understand what it is.
THE OPPORTUNITY
The opportunity I am speaking of is reliability. This opportunity is the result of true reliability, and more specifically, the leadership of reliability. Organizations need a reliability professional directing their efforts. A reliability professional has a lifetime of real-world experience, a journeyman’s license, certifications, professional licenses, and a professional reputation of success. To develop and lead your reliability teams they must have worked as a combination of reliability person, planner, supervisor, reliability engineer, and reliability manager. In addition to this level of practical real-world experience, they need to possess an advanced education with finance, development, change, and leadership concentrations.
Reliability leadership is not a growth position for young engineers nor a position delegated to production managers. Look again to Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great, in which he observes the necessity of having the right people on the bus. “Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people. Worse, it can drive away the best people. Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated.” Consultants, engineers, and production personnel are not reliability professionals and are the wrong people to lead these efforts. This is not my isolated observation but one repeated throughout literature. Daniel Daly, author of The Little Black Book of Reliability Management, a mechanical engineer, professional engineer, and certified maintenance and reliability professional, states, “I began working as a mechanical engineer. The things I learned in college and the books I used were of limited value.” He goes on to discuss how the experienced folks were the true teachers. He refers to them as the “old heads.” The current propensity to fill reliability management positions with the wrong people has prevented organizations’ transformation from good to great. The first step is to build the right bus and then get the right people on it.
Let’s break this down a little further to help everyone understand what I am saying. When we compare a four-year engineering student to a four-year apprenticeship with the end goal of being a reliability professional, there is no “apples to apples” comparison. During a four-year apprenticeship, an individual will learn how to: troubleshoot electrical and mechanical systems, align these systems, identify when they are not functioning at their optimal performance, change faulty components, rebuild failed components, understand the intricacies of how each component works in its system, and learn the individual personality of each system in order to assist in ensuring its reliability. They learn how to make adjustments that are component specific or system reliant and not just what the nominal setting should be. There is a lot more to knowing how a system works and how to make it perform at its peak than understanding the theory.
DEGREE VS. APPRENTICESHIP
In comparison, a four-year engineering degree does not teach you any of this. You learn a lot about what things are and what they are supposed to do. You learn social science, English, math, psychology, and many other things, but you don’t learn how to make anything work. Most of the time you are being taught by professors who lack practical experience and have nothing more than an academic knowledge. They offer theory but no hands-on experience about how to implement these theories and make things work. The belief that this is enough is compounded by the decision by senior leaders that this is enough to give you the tools to lead reliability efforts. Again, do not get me wrong, I have several degrees, but none of them in and of themselves grant me the ability to lead reliability. It is my journeyman level skills that do that. It was the shift in senior leaders’ decision making that has led to the hiring of engineers to lead reliability that started the death spiral. At first it did not have a big impact because there was still a lot of bench strength in the trade ranks. This covered for the lack of trade skills possessed by these engineers and unqualified leaders. However, over the last 30 years this approach has eaten away at maintenance and reliability like a cancer, until we arrive at today, with the continued practice of hiring engineers causing the trade bench strength to leave us. This combination is killing reliability because there is no one left to develop the next generation of skilled tradespeople and if left unattended this will eventually lead to its death. The fix is for the few remaining reliability professionals to do something to turn this around. The first step is for our industry to understand that we have a problem. This is tough because it requires a large portion of today’s leaders to admit that they are not qualified for their positions. The next step is to be willing to do something about it.
On a positive note, there are some who know they lack these abilities. The problem is that we turn to miracle drugs for a quick cure, in the form of consultants. This makes things worse, because the majority of consultants suffer from the same disease. They are engineers without the trade skills, spouting fancy sounding programs with quick fixes. They all use the terms “best practices” or “world class,” but these are little more than empty promises rooted in no real substance. There is no substitute for hard work. Copying what consultants say they achieved somewhere else will make them rich and you worse off than if you did nothing. Their goal is to get paid, not your organization’s success.
You do not gain a competitive advantage by copying others. True leaders create and do not need to copy. Each organization is its own entity, and you cannot copy your way to success. Reliability leadership needs to consist of people who can create on their feet using years of experience and education. The respect of the reliability personnel is necessary, and that comes from the shared experience of doing the jobs we are asking them to do. To lead the changes necessary in any organization, you must have a leader who has done the work and is not reiterating