How to Build a Maintenance Excellence Team (Part 2)

This is the second in a series of four articles on how to evolve your maintenance maturity over time. Taken together, this series will provide a roadmap for becoming a first-class maintenance team. Each article will cover one step in the process: crawl, walk, run, and sprint. The material is based on the author’s experience implementing it in his own organization. To read part 1 of the series, click here. George Miconi is a Maintenance Planner with Worthington Industries.

Walk―Fine-Tuning Your Initial Startup―Keeping It Going―At Least 14 to 18 Months

You’ve established your maintenance footprint and how it’s going to operate within your facility. Now’s the challenging time to make sure you continue to follow what you have in place. This is where most tend to fail because they fall back on their old ways. DO NOT LET THIS HAPPEN! Make sure you’re having maintenance meetings on time and as scheduled.

When team members start to no-show for your meetings, but come to you later for work needing done, this is when you simply say to make sure that they bring it to the next maintenance meeting where everyone can review it then. There are exceptions to this, and your judgement will decide if it’s the hard road to take or the easy one. 

You must establish this mentality with the maintenance group as a whole, and make sure that they’re all on board. There can only be one way to submit work―through work requests that are reviewed at every maintenance meeting. This takes a few times, and it stops quickly once team members understand the maintenance department is set in the process. 

In addition, continuously follow what you’ve already established and start talking about your metrics at each maintenance meeting. Let everyone and anyone who might have a better way of doing things talk about it and even give it a try. This will allow the team to understand that everyone is in it together (buy-in). 

Begin working to improve the following items to help you continuously get better. 

PM Review and Update

This area offers the biggest bang for your buck. Often, a preventive maintenance (PM) task is not even being done as described, but due to tribal knowledge, everyone knows it’s wrong and simply does it the right way. The importance of having a correct and accurate PM is the difference between breakdown and continuous operation. I recommend you review all the PMs, and once you have done that, if possible, walk through each one to make sure it flows with the machinery. By streamlining the process, it saves time and money. If you need to create PMs, the simple way is asking the manufacturer of the machine what they expect to be maintained and go from there. Otherwise, the internet is a great source of information.

Streamlining PM Example

The PM starts at the front of a machine:

1. Check entry safety decals to assure that they’re present for the puller.

2. Go to the rail car line (located outside and ¼-mile long from switch to carstop) and make sure there are no loose rails, ties, or debris in the area.

3. Check entry puller for loose/play on reel. 

You should see that #2 should be the very first thing you would do or the very last item. Look at each PM as a road map. Start at a point and go to the end. DO NOT ZIGZAG.

Look at Your Metrics That Are in Place

Evaluate if your metrics are gathering the information needed to see and track improvements. If not, find ones that will help you do so. This may not sit well with some of you, but it’s how I feel from seeing this firsthand. Unless you’re working on a car, aircraft, train, ship motor, and/or assembly line work, the only time that flag time could be possibly close to correct would be on a PM. I say this because a PM is an inspection, and the route and time it takes to complete these is accurate. 

That is, if you’ve streamlined the route. This is one of the differences between world-class maintenance and first-class maintenance. The first-class maintenance group asks for the time it took you to do it; not that you should be able to do this in four hours. PMs are excluded because this route is planned and frequently updated.

Let’s say for example you have a work order for changing pillow block bearings on the cutter. There are four bolts with no guard. The shaft is not a press fit and simply slides out, and the roll weighs less than 10 pounds. World-class knows that it takes 1.15 hours to do this job. First-class knows that it needs done and sends someone to work on it. The technician working on the job finishes and records his or her hours as .75 of an hour.

• First-class: No added pressure, allows the person to do what they’ve been trained to do in an already stressful situation. The task was accomplished, and the technician determined that a grease fitting was broken off. That was the root cause for this failure. Working on relocating the fitting to prevent it from happening again. 

• World-class: 1.15 hours technician is hurrying to get this done, so he or she can go to the next item on their list since it’s planned out for their 8-hour shift. I can say that this is not how I would like to have work given to me. If anyone can explain that they’re all for receiving jobs/tasks in this manner, the B.S. button is pushed. 

Lubrication Is More Than Simply Changing Oil and Filters 

Begin to investigate lubrication and start to understand that this is more than simply changing oil and filters. This is the time to verify that the correct lubricant is being used for your machines. The manufacturer will provide this information, or you can check the manual. This is something that you will build on as time goes on. I recommend picking out one machine and starting there.

If a hydraulic power unit is used, check/install breather, and for the filling unit, use quick disconnect/sealed containers to dispense. An oil sample needs to be taken and analyzed. If possible, visually inspect the inside of the tank for sludge, algae, or condensation. Make sure oil sight glasses are clean and clear. I like to paint the area around the tank light grey or white. That way if you keep it clean, it’s very easy to notice when a leak starts. 

Create a Critical Spares List

I recommend reading How do you determine which repair parts are critical? by Wally Wilson, CPIM, Life Cycle Engineering. This is a must-read article. Then, as a rule of thumb, anything with a lead time of three days or longer should be spared. Also, anything that will stop production completely needs to be spared. These items will differ from company to company depending on your needs. This is something you can discuss at the maintenance meetings and allow others to have their input. Start with a simple machine first, so you have an idea of what you’re getting into and the space available to store these items.  

Predictive Maintenance Practices

Predictive maintenance (PdM) practices are a must if you want to see results. Start out by taking the time to understand which, if not all, of these you would benefit from to reduce downtime:

• Vibration monitoring/analysis

• Lubricant monitoring/analysis

• Ultrasonic noise detection

• Infrared thermography

• Nondestructive testing

• Visual inspections

• Motor circuit analysis

Set these up in a way that makes sense for your operational needs. I recommend using all of these; however, you’ll need to slowly work them in on a regular PM schedule. Remember, PMs must get done as scheduled and reviewed regularly to keep improving. I suggest starting with infrared thermography and vibration monitoring. These two combined will provide you with more than enough data to keep you very busy initially. Then bring another online and so on.

Maintenance Technician Ownership

Another important aspect is having a maintenance technician assigned to a specific machine to be held accountable for. Once this was established at our organization, we were able to see the communication aspect take shape with both the operators and maintenance technicians. They took pride in the idea of being the most productive team/machine in the plant. More detail on this will be found in the next article in this series. 

Reviewing the Steps Taken to Get to This Point

Review the Maintenance Work Requisition 

Use feedback received from the people using it. Go out and ask the users these five questions:

1. What needs to be added to the sheet?

2. What do you feel needs to be taken off the sheet, and why? 

3. Are you aware of where your request(s) are? Completed/in-process/not being done―this is key to making sure your customer knows that if it’s filled out, it’ll be processed. If you don’t communicate with the end user, they will simply think why bother? This is key!

4. Where are the sheets located, and are they readily available? Have someone show you. It’s great if they know where they are, but not if it’s always empty. Technicians won’t use them if the box is always empty.

5. On a scale of one to five, how do you think the request process is going? (5 is great; 1 is failing.)

Feedback from everyone. It’s a team effort, always remember that. 

Review the Work Order Status Types 

Review the work order status types and make sure they’re what you need for your situation. Released, unreleased, and breakdown should be the meat and potatoes for you. This can be added to as you move forward on your journey. I don’t recommend adding additional status types; however, this is your decision. I do recommend adding different types of work orders to allow for a more detailed root cause analysis. This will be covered in more detail in the next article in this series.

Four Important Questions to Ask

In your maintenance meetings, ask these four questions and build on them from the responses you receive from your team members. This will allow you to see areas to improve in.

1. Did we find a root cause and eliminate a major problem? If so, what and how did we figure it out?

2. Did we talk to production, sales, safety, engineering, our customer, and maintenance prior to new equipment being installed/purchased? Are there manuals, drawings, etc? Did we buy it, and it’s here now?

3. Can someone tell you your downtime/overall equipment effectiveness percentage for the month? What’s the goal set at, and is it obtainable?

4. What can we do to get better at (the lagging metric) PM compliance, planned maintenance compliance, and breakdown work orders? These are the main metrics that will show a huge difference if you keep improving on them. These are the needle movers, so to speak. 

Scheduling Outages

How close are you to scheduling your outages 12 months in advance? Also, are your outage dates holding after being scheduled? Do you have defined timeframes in place for outages vs. downturns? What did you decide the difference was for each? This is a good idea of how advanced your maintenance department has become. In the previous article in this series, it said that an outage is more than 16 hours of no production. A downturn, on the other hand, should not extend past eight hours or one shift. 

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

Communicate, and then communicate some more, so no one is left in the dark! There are no bad ideas. Try it out, look to become better, and continue to ask questions! Ownership, pride! This is something that once you start, it seems to happen automatically and keeps getting better within the team.

When You Know You’re Ready to Start Running          

You know you’re ready to start the next step when:

1. You eliminate waste at the root cause, i.e., reducing downtime, maintenance costs declining, no rework, and wanting to understand reliability and maintenance! Also, leaving the parts-changing environment to the root cause analysis way of maintenance. 

2. You implement best practices and standard work for routine maintenance, if possible. 

3. Your production and maintenance employees are implementing ideas and driving improvements. Do not discard any idea brought to your attention. This will build trust and cause more ideas to flow in. You’ll receive a few ideas that aren’t a good choice or even relevant to your plant. Simply communicate back to the employees, “Thanks for your submission on the matter. It’s being reviewed. This is making us better, thanks again.” If you crush their spirit, the process will fail.

4. You look at everything through a lens of continuous improvement. You’re asking, “How can we make this better?” Also, an increased focus on using data and metrics to drive decisions. 

Conclusion

To recap:

• PM review and update: this area offers the biggest bang for your buck.

• Look at your metrics that are in place. Evaluate if they’re gathering the information needed to see and track improvements.

• Begin to investigate lubrication, and start to understand that this is more than simply changing oil and filters. 

• Create a critical spares list.

• PdM practices are a must if you want to see results.

• Assign a maintenance technician to a specific machine to be held accountable for.

• Review all the steps taken to get to this point. 

I would appreciate having your comments and ideas on ways you’re using this, and what you’ve found out on your journey. You can reach me at [email protected]. I’m far from being the all-knowing one with all the answers. I’m on the same journey as you and am always looking to get better and find new ways of doing so. I can only tell you what our team has accomplished in the past 10 years and continue to document our journey. 

To read part 3 of this series, click here.