The Death of Reliability: Is it Too Late to Resurrect the Last, True Competitive Advantage?. Nathan C. Wright
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have held each reliability position and can train and develop the personnel needed to drive success.
TOP MANAGEMENT TEAM
With an ever-increasing competitive business environment, corporations need to take advantage of every opportunity to maximize their resources. The composition of a top management team (TMT) is of critical importance in accomplishing this. A successful top management team is usually comprised of members who have higher educational levels and have risen through the ranks. The tenured team members are normally made up of members that have risen only through the operational ranks, or worse, transferred from another organization or industry and having even less qualifications. The most recent wave in senior leader promotion is to elevate attorneys or accountants who have no practical manufacturing experience. They focus solely on leading by policy or the bottom line. The effect of the TMT composition has a direct effect on corporate strategy and competitiveness.
With the increase in corporate competitiveness and the need to do more with less, Top Management Teams are looking for ways to eliminate waste from their organizations and maximize the use of their existing resources. Opening their eyes to an untapped resource will intrigue not only TMT but reliability professionals looking to advance within the reliability arena and within their organizations. Where there was once a ceiling for these professionals, there may now be an opportunity.
When I get asked if leaders are made or born, I answer made. In the multitude of leadership training classes I have attended, I have heard more times than not people answer this question with they are born. I always chuckle because if that was true, why are we all in this class? I have included four major objectives for the leadership discussions in this book. The first is to provide a deeper understanding of what makes up leadership development. The second is to challenge the notion that leaders are born. The third is to give an explanation of what elements comprise leadership efforts. The fourth is to develop full leadership potential and create an ability to turn those they lead into leaders.
COMMON CAUSES OF MACHINE FAILURE
Equipment fails for a lot of reasons and not all failures are the same. The term “failure” or “malfunction” means that the equipment has stopped functioning the way it was designed to. I call this unreliability of the equipment or component. An example of this would be if a pump is designed to pump 10 gallons per minute, but as it ages its output is reduced to 8 gallons per minute, this is a form of unreliability. Using the Pareto Principle, we know that 80% of the failure occurrences are caused by 20% of the causes. The same is true if 80% of all downtime is caused by 20% of the plant’s equipment.
Machines do not die—we kill them! Though equipment fails for a lot of reasons, they all fall into one of three major categories: improper lubrication, contamination, and improper installation. This book is designed to help you understand the pitfalls associated with efforts to eliminate these problems and how to properly address them using a hands-on, practical, common sense approach.
UNDERSTANDING RELIABILITY EFFORTS
To achieve reliability, an organization needs to understand that there cannot be a company or production plan and a reliability plan. There should only be one plan, and the name is not important. I refer to all plant operational efforts as reliability. If you visit any organization that I have worked with or in, you will hear and see a lot of reliability focused approaches. Integrating production and reliability is the only path to success. This is easier said than done.
Across most industries, the words maintenance and reliability have become synonyms. This could not be further from the truth. If your organization believes that these words are interchangeable, you have a big uphill battle. The difference between maintenance and reliability is vast in effort and focus. To maintain, you strive to keep the status quo. You are not improving your processes because you believe you have achieved your desired approach. A maintenance effort is something the maintenance department is responsible for. Most organizations that have maintenance departments are operating in silos and look for maintenance to do all things involving physical labor. The mindset that is predominant throughout these companies is “we operate it, and you fix it.”
Reliability is focused on the future. A reliability effort is all about continuous improvement and looking for proactive measures to intervene in all failure modes to enable your equipment to reach its designed life. I will go as far as renaming your maintenance department a reliability department. This is a cultural change and as we all know changing people is tougher than changing an approach. One big change is to eliminate the antiquated view that reliability work is a service to production. These efforts are equals and partners to production. Without either you do not produce your product. One key element to making this change successfully is having a true reliability professional with real-world experience in leading change. The individual needs to have a transformational leadership style to effectively transform an organization. A true reliability professional will be able to articulate how to get this done. Not with fancy sounding programs or “mother statements” but by being able to share hands-on experience doing it, not repeating something they read or heard. We will discuss these individual items throughout this text.
Reliability is an operation objective and not a maintenance effort or flavor of the month. If reliability is implemented correctly, it becomes the organization’s way of life. This requires support from every level of management. Only with the support of all departments will any reliability effort succeed. As I have said, and it deserves repeating, an important step in achieving this is to break up the supplier-customer mentality and to work as a team; otherwise, any reliability effort will not produce results and will frustrate everyone involved.
Reliability is an organizational level effort and to achieve this the organization must address the three main root causes that result in unreliability: improper lubrication, contamination, and improper installation. Of these three, lubrication, or better said, improper lubrication is the most prominent.
A quick visual reference of the breakdown of unreliability can be found in Figure 1.1.
How does this breakdown work? Improper lubrication drives mechanical wear and corrosion, which leads to premature failure of your lubricated assets. If your organization does nothing else to improve reliability, you should address your lubrication. It offers the biggest bang for your buck and can be implemented relatively cost effectively because most organizations are already spending money on lubrication and they just need to know how to do so effectively.
Figure 1.1 Unreliability Hierarchy.
Contamination is the next group, which is broken into contamination of your lubricants and spare parts (specifically in their storage and handling), and the physical contamination of the equipment caused by poor housekeeping. Again, it is relatively cost effective to get your teams to do housekeeping and store your lubricants and spare parts correctly. However, it can be difficult to achieve if your leaders lack the necessary skills to lead their teams. Poor housekeeping is a direct representation of a lack of leadership, so addressing this problem needs to be focused on your leaders, not their teams. The third and final group is improper installation. This is made up of your maintenance, repairs, and operations (MRO), engineering, and your training. As I have repeated about the first two groups, this is