Maintenance Standards at Weyerhaeuser Company

Pat DiGiuseppe, Weyerhaeuser

Are you Meeting your Highest Maintenance Standards?

The maintenance impact on manufacturing results has traditionally been measured in terms of cost. As equipment reliability became a focus area in our industry, the strategic value of maintenance effectiveness became apparent to business leaders. For mill leaders, this brought the dilemma of balancing a need to reduce costs with an expectation that reliability must improve. From a total corporation view, wide disparity among site results establishes the need to lead and support change in maintenance performance. It is this kind of variability among sites that provides the opportunity to improve performance.

High performing sites typically deliver superior equipment reliability on a consistent basis. Maintenance processes are good to excellent and sustained over time even with leadership changes. This strength can usually be traced to the “built in” processes owned by the organization and capable of withstanding changes in personnel to a great extent. Underperforming sites have great difficulty accepting the discipline applied to maintenance practices at the best performing sites. Culture and NIV characteristics often prevent them from reaching their full capability. The strategy to accomplish this in a multi-mill system is the challenge faced today by most manufacturing companies.

At Weyerhaeuser, a Maintenance and Engineering Council was established over 20 years ago to provide a means of learning from each other. Members were the site leaders for both disciplines. Contact between sites included annual meetings, benchmarking visits and some resource sharing. Improvements were made but became difficult to build upon and sustain. However relationships were built during this period that laid the groundwork for the ability to transfer Standard Maintenance Practices.

With support from the top of the Company, leaders in wood products and pulp/paper together established an agenda for the Council which set priorities for a three year period. The basics were identified as critical to building a solid foundation for maintenance excellence. First among them is the partnership necessary between maintenance, operations and materials management. Without this in place, efforts to achieve improvement inevitably lead to conflict and wasted energy. This aspect of equipment reliability performance is often overlooked leaving mill functional units to independently work toward improvement while treating each other with an internal “customer/supplier” mentality. When supported by a site manager or corporate leader, this is a self defeating approach leading units to compete and challenge each other for results without responsibility for cost or site wide impact.

Ownership of total manufacturing by all team members including maintenance excellence is not well recognized in our industry. The concept of a strong partnership to optimize total manufacturing is a key foundation element for success. This partnership includes joint accountability for results including maintenance costs and equipment reliability shared by operations, maintenance and materials management.

Effective planning and scheduling was identified as key to building and sustaining results. It is essential and requires strong organizational commitment before other aspects of maintenance excellence can be successful. It must be viewed as an equipment reliability process, not just maintenance management.

Defect elimination through failure analysis was identified among early priorities. It also requires a discipline in the mill organization that is difficult to sustain. Maintenance historically is measured and rewarded by the ability to react to failures quickly. While response is important, analysis and defect elimination are more critical however are often viewed as time consuming and of little value in organizations with poor reliability performance.

Other maintenance standards are being established for technical and maintenance management practices.

Owners (from the Council) were identified for each standard practice and a team of experts from various sites were commissioned to draft the key elements for each practice. This approach established ownership and credibility among the mills. Company leadership support was and continues to be essential.

Sustaining effective practices through leadership changes and market fluctuations is challenging in our industry. Publishing the standards does not guarantee effective implementation and improvement over time. For this reason, an assessment tool was developed to audit mill status and provide recommendations for improvement.

Teams are formed utilizing maintenance and engineering leaders across the Company to carry out the process. Results are combined and presented to measure trend improvement and provide each site with a snapshot of their level of performance versus our best and average scores. The visual impact is convincing to site leadership teams looking for useful maintenance benchmarks. Summary results from ten mills are attached.

Assessments will be conducted on two year cycles with follow up support from leadership in the interim. Maintenance standards and processes are utilized across the Company for manufacturing support including wood products and pulp/paper. Corporate and mill personnel combine to support implementation and assist in problem resolution.

Pictured below is a graphic summary of assessment results from ten mills showing the expected weakness in planning and scheduling performance. This initial data forms for results tracking over time.

maintenance assessments help create higher maintenance standards

How to Fix the 70/30 Phenomenon

When you ask front line supervisors or team leaders if all people in their teams are performing to the same standards or if some are doing more work and achieving more results than others, you will often get the same answer. All over the world, the most common answer, after some analysis, verifies that about 30% of the people do 70% of the work.

Zen and the Art of Managing Maintenance

Unfettered expression and spiritual satisfaction? How does this relate to managing a maintenance department, especially one in the U.S. Postal Service? Open your mind. Take a page from the Zen Buddhist monks who preach: When you are quiet and listen, you become aware of sounds not normally heard. USPS maintenance leaders are listening and beginning to understand that maintenance success doesn't come through closed minds and closed doors.

Why do maintenance improvement initiatives fail to deliver? (Hedgehog or Fox?)

It is not uncommon that many reliability and maintenance improvement initiatives fail to deliver expected results. Why is it so? Some of the most common causes I have observed include:

Why Maintenance Improvement Efforts Fail

Why do improvement efforts fail or perhaps not sustain the gains? There are many reasons, but those most often stated are “lack of commitment” and not “following the process”. But why is there lack of commitment, and why aren’t processes followed? Here are a few of the reasons that I’ve seen:

TPM and RCM: Whirled Class

When a piece of production machinery broke down at the Whirlpool plant in Findlay, Ohio, several years back, it was accepted practice for the machine operator to call maintenance and then sit back and wait for the problem to be fixed. Critical information and knowledge was not shared between the operator and maintenance technician. Like many companies, these workers were stuck in traditional roles - operators run the machines, maintenance fixes the machines, and the two do not cross. As a result, productivity opportunities were missed.

Where Do Maintenance Professionals Come From?

Many managers are unaware that best-in-class companies routinely design-out maintenance at the inception of a project. That, clearly, is the first key to highest equipment reliability and plant profitability. Whenever maintenance events occur as time goes on, the real industry leaders see every one of these events as an opportunity to upgrade. Indeed, upgrading is the second key, and upgrading is the job of highly trained, well-organized, knowledgeable reliability professionals.

TPM and Tecate: The New Translation

The true translation — might it be proper to say a new and improved translation? — is being used today by Cervecería Cuauhtemoc Moctezuma, one of the largest brewers of beer in Latin America. Known throughout this company as Mantenimiento Alto Desempeño (MAD), or translated as High-Performance Maintenance, the concept of TPM is alive and well at the company's six plants in Mexico. Perhaps the best example is at CCM's brewery in Tecate, located a short drive from the U.S.-Mexico border on the Baja California peninsula.

Maintenance Standards at Weyerhaeuser Company