Where Do Maintenance Professionals Come From?

www.machineryreliability.com

-“World-class performance is impossible to achieve without qualified maintenance professionals…”-

Not long ago, the maintenance manager of a world-scale petrochemical plant located off shore sent us a distress message. He detailed the long-term effects of “reengineering” by blindly downsizing the reliability assurance and improvement function in a number of modern plants.

“We are continuously plagued with problems associated with plant rotating equipment and turbomachinery,” he wrote. “The quality of maintenance on our rotating equipment has deteriorated to the point where we suffered severe losses, including fatalities … To this end, I am seeking assistance, support, and guidance in how I should proceed.”

This manager deserves considerable credit for recognizing the seriousness of the situation and asking for help. Encouraged by our quick response, he sent additional details. He candidly outlined what went wrong, his current competency gap, and how he planned to recover, suggesting the following:

Carry out an audit of his maintenance systems, procedures, and personnel specific to rotating equipment maintenance.
Set up a team of professionals and experts to work with him for an initial period of 6 months.
Provide consulting support and follow-up service for some period thereafter.

He continued by highlighting the overall purpose of the team—“to complement the existing maintenance team by injecting professionalism, quality, experience, and expertise” in the following disciplines: rotating equipment maintenance, electrical and instrument maintenance, maintenance supervision, and maintenance planning.

For members of the rotating equipment team, he specified:

10 to 15 years of hands-on experience in maintaining and overhauling rotating equipment, including general purpose steam turbines, high speed/high horsepower turbomachinery, pumps, compressors, blowers, gearboxes, lubrication systems, bearing maintenance, mechanical seals, alignment, and leak repairs.
Mechanical engineering technician diploma as a minimum requirement.
Systematic approach to troubleshooting and diagnostics of problems associated with plant rotating equipment, through quality procedures and checklists.

Requirements for the other disciplines were equally rigorous—10 to 15 years experience, technician diploma, etc. Furthermore, he specified that all members of the team must be between 35 and 45 years of age; able to communicate professionally to all levels of the organization; proactive in their approach to work; able to adapt to the local environment and local organizational and societal culture in a very short time period; and more.

We simply couldn’t help but notice the age qualifications sought in this instance. The expert retiree is ruled out, and one might wonder as to which qualified 35- to 45-year-old resident of North America or Western Europe is willing to take on the cultural, technical, and procedural challenges that were laid out or implied by the client. Which brings us to the point:

Where were the maintenance and reliability professionals to 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.

World-class performance is impossible to achieve without qualified maintenance professionals, and the notion that these professionals could always be hired on a moment’s notice is unrealistic. Similarly, the idea that contractors can fill the gap surely lacks merit. Where would the contractor’s young engineers have received their training?

And, while we will do our best to work with this client, here’s our advice to the plant manager who understands the value of a thoroughly well-trained maintenance-reliability workforce: Develop them and hold on to them.

Start by compiling a role statement, then progress to mapping out a training plan. Interview a number of interested candidates and select the right ones. Give them periodic performance feedback, defend their goals and contributions as necessary and appropriate. Don’t ever allow the trained reliability professional to become just a pair of hands, or a person whose entire time is spent fighting repair deadlines rather than being immersed in proactive failure prevention. Groom this reliability professional’s abilities, judgment, and motivation; do it by encouraging access to his or her peers. Ask this person to use analytical skills to the utmost, to read, to write, to communicate. All parties will benefit if you carefully and consistently implement this “grow-your-own” formula.

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.

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.

Where Do Maintenance Professionals Come From?