Viaje de confiabilidad | Cómo iniciar, desarrollar y mantener

Do your maintenance and reliability initiatives seem to stall out like New Year’s resolutions? In this article, we’ll supply tips on how to get started by laying out your roadmap. In addition, we’ll cover how to maintain/sustain your program’s momentum along the journey.

Getting Started - What's Your Start Point?

Most groups recognize the need for change; however, oftentimes they start some type of change initiative and get overwhelmed trying to figure out where to begin. It can be very daunting when you think about it, especially if you’re comparing yourself to others that may be considered “best in class.” You must remember, those best-in-class companies also started or ventured through a similar state to where you are currently. There are some groups that may even envy you at your current state. 

My first suggestion is to compare yourselves to others only when you’re trying to develop your group’s Future State Vision, or to benchmark certain aspects of your program. (I’ll discuss Future State Vision later.)  It’s more important to do a superior self-assessment of your current state: what you do well, and where you’re struggling within your current programs. When doing this self-assessment, focus on the areas of your current written programs. This will set your baseline.  

At this point, you probably will still see multiple areas that can be improved on. But at least now you have a documented baseline that you’ll be starting from. You cannot start a journey or set direction for where you want to go if you don’t know the starting point.  

You cannot just jump in at this point to start working on items. Where do you want to go? Who’s going with you? And who needs to be informed that you’re heading off on a journey? 

Develop Your Future State Vision - Where Are You Going?

Once you know your starting point after a baseline assessment, it’s important that a clear future state vision can be articulated to those working on, and within, the resulting program. Without a clear roadmap for the people to coalesce or rally around, it will be difficult to gain support and buy-in. 

I’ve found that it has worked best to get a small cross-function of the group together to work on that vision. When initiatives were initially started amongst my current team, our small group that initially set the vision was made up of four people. Two were Senior Maintenance Specialists, one Maintenance Supervisor, and me. This group became the foundational team that has now morphed into our Reliability Strategy Team, which has now grown to nine total members amongst a department of approximately 60 team members. Every year, this Strategy Team reviews our vision statement and sets the priority of activities for the upcoming year. 

You may be thinking, “But Joe, we have a vision or mission statement.” It’s important to be able to articulate what this vision statement looks like to people during their daily tasks, how it will or does affect their role every day. Here’s an example: 

• Part of your vision statement is to reduce unplanned, emergency work to 10% of total work

• Part of your strategy to get there is to improve your planning & scheduling processes

• The message to the team could be, “The future state of your job will be one that when you arrive at work on Monday, you will know all the work that is assigned to you each day of that week. And you should only expect to be interrupted from that work 10% of the time.”

Being able to articulate the vision to make it personal and impactful to the individual gets them excited and involved in the change initiative’s success.

Cross-Functional Participation - Who's Going With You?

It’s important to have participation from different groups in your team, and possibly other groups outside your team, when working on aspects of your program’s initiatives. As noted in the previous section, our current Strategy Team was initially made up of a cross-section and still is. It has representation from all members of the department’s leadership team, senior-level Maintenance Specialists/Technicians, as well as members of the Manufacturing, Engineering, and Spare Parts team. 

The level and broadness that build your teams is dictated by the scope of the activity being undertaken. You’re looking for diversity of thought, experiences, and useful insights within the cross-functional participants. There needs to be value added by their participation. So, some members may only be needed for smaller durations or specific questions. Some may be there just to learn a new topic for future development or involvement. Which reminds me, make sure everyone knows why they’re participating and their role. 

In addition to the example about the makeup of members for a Strategy Team, here’s some more examples based on different activities:

Preventive Maintenance (PM) Optimization

Representation from all shifts for your Maintenance Technicians, Maintenance Supervision, Manufacturing and/or Reliability Engineers, and Planner as main players. Spare Parts representative as a secondary player to be informed of any changes that may impact their work. This ensures all technical resources are in the loop on changes being done and have the opportunity to provide input and feedback. If you have operator-performed PMs or steps within a PM, you should add representatives from those groups as well.

Criticality Assessment or Failure Mode & Effects Analysis (FMEA) Type Activities

Criticality assessment or failure mode & effects analysis (FMEA) type activities from an equipment perspective: representation from Maintenance Technicians, Production Operators, Supervision, Manufacturing, and/or Reliability Engineering would be primary roles needed. Secondary roles would be Quality Engineering and Safety personnel. This depends on how your company’s structure is defined.  

Kaizen Events Like Changeover Reductions/Single-Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED)

Production Operators, Supervision, Process Improvement, or Industrial Engineers would be primary roles for activities that are owned by Operations. Add in Manufacturing/Reliability Engineers and Maintenance Technicians if it's a combined effort or an activity owned by the technical teams. 

Again, it’s all about making sure that there’s diversity of thought and experiences along with value being added due to their participation.

Stakeholder Support - Who's Informed That You're Heading Out?

This really depends on the company, its organizational structure, and how autonomy or ownership is driven to levels of the organization. From my experiences, if the manager responsible for reliability and maintenance activities is onboard, then that's really all the support you should need when working within a single-site structure. Most of the initiatives will end up being self-funded within your department’s budget. This is why Plant Manager support is a plus, especially when it comes to supporting new funding requests for items outside your departmental budgets.  

It’s also important to keep the operations or production groups as informed stakeholders on program initiative activities. They may see changes in how interactions take place, and how services being provided change as the program evolves. I’ve found the best way to do this is to present the Future State Vision and update information to the Production and/or Plant Manager’s leadership meetings as your program moves through its progression. 

First Steps

Going back and looking at the multiple areas of opportunity that were presented from your baseline assessment versus your Future State Vision, there is now a decision to make. Which area(s) to choose, and how many can we do at one time?

Based on my experiences leading teams in typical sizes of 25 to 60 members, you should really start off with one activity. Pull in your equivalent of the Strategy Team that I mentioned earlier and have all members of the team work on that one activity. You’re starting something new, and you want to keep the excitement that comes from starting something new as a positive and get that first win for your program.

I recommend picking an area that fills a gap that can be accomplished in a Free & Easy method. Free & Easy is something that I define as it’s capable of being accomplished with the scope, control, and resources of your current team and can get implemented within 90 days. It doesn’t involve decision-making or approvals from stakeholders, just the members of the Strategy Team.

By looking at items from this perspective, it reduces bureaucratic hurdles and gives the team working on it a sense of empowerment and accomplishment when it's completed. It also gets the first win quickly to build momentum for other items. Long-duration activities that involve a lot of bureaucratic oversight, whether funding approvals or change control processes, are some of the biggest momentum killers. And you don’t want those hurdles when starting your journey. 

When working through different improvement projects, it’s very important to define the scope, the team members, and what metrics will be used to measure and define successful completion of the project. Using plan-do-check-act (PDCA) or a similar tool is helpful to provide a template. Projects should not only be measured by meeting the timelines (i.e., 90 days) to complete. The success should also be measured by the metric or performance indicator (PI) defined to remove this area as an opportunity and move it to the area of what the team does well.

Having this defined is important, so it can be tracked even after completion to keep it from backsliding or reverting to old habits. Using this metric as a key performance indicator (KPI) being tracked during implementation and up to a year after is a good way to sustain the improvement. After a year, the Strategy Team can decide whether it stays on your scorecard of metrics as a KPI or gets downgraded to a PI that is just monitored (more on this later).

Moving Forward After the First Win

Once your Strategy Team gets that first win, the next hurdle that’s typically faced is getting started on the next improvement area. I’ve found in my experiences that this is the point where you can start doing more than one project at a time. You need to be purposeful in the team makeup, though, for this to succeed. 

What has worked well at this point for me is to divide the Strategy team into two groups, so two projects can be worked on. This allows for strategic alignment to remain. Pull in other people to fill out the rest of the team based on the skills needed to have good cross-functional participation. This provides a few benefits.  

• It gets more people engaged in changes occurring toward that Future State Vision.

• It provides a bench of team members that learn the tools, techniques like PDCA, etc. that can then be leveraged to be facilitators for future activities. 

• It provides that diversity of thought that was talked about earlier.

Depending on how much your team can handle after completion of the next two projects, you can proceed on different paths. You can try dividing the two teams into four or more to tackle more projects simultaneously, or keep your project teams to two or three. It really depends on the makeup of your team in their ability to facilitate and complete projects in a timely manner.

I’ve found with typical team sizes that it’s difficult to maintain more than three improvement teams at the same time. It’s just too much while also doing their primary roles. So, unless you’re able to have teams that are 100% dedicated to the improvement initiatives, I wouldn’t try to have more than three teams at one time.

Another expectation that I have of the improvement teams is to provide project updates on a monthly basis during our departmental meetings, so everyone is informed of the progress. Also, to provide an end-of-project presentation showing the case study and the returns that we have seen 90 days after the completion of the project to show the initial effectiveness of said project.

Sustain Momentum - Don't Leave Your Wallet at Home

How many times have you left the house for a trip and had to circle back because you forgot something like your wallet, phone, etc.? Circling back to retrieve whatever it was just killed all momentum for your trip. Any time that you must circle back on past improvements slows down progress and at worst, kills all momentum.

So, how can you sustain the improvements that you’ve made while still striving and driving for more? Sustaining improvements are often difficult when there is no purpose put into how to sustain them. Here are three things to consider in order to truly sustain an improvement activity after it’s been implemented:

• Ensure the metric(s) used during the improvement activity are still tracked and monitored as part of your normal review cycle.

• Embed the improvement into your written process. 

• Involve others in the sustaining activity outside the team that deployed them.

I’ve witnessed examples where some combination of these three items were not covered as part of the post-improvement sustainability activities. This resulted in the improvements reverting to the old state or even worse than the old state. Here’s a real-world example of this occurring.

A few years ago, a Kaizen event was held to reduce the time on changeover activities. That team was able to deliver a 48% reduction in time for those changeovers through changing work practices and such. Since that event, there have been multiple changes within that department’s leadership team. The metric that tracked changeover time went from being reviewed by the department leadership on a weekly basis and with the entire team on monthly basis. It stopped being tracked.

As Dr. Deming noted, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” The fact that they stopped paying attention to one of their KPIs resulted in the changeover times reverting to become worse than the pre-Kaizen event level. 

The metric used was still available to be tracked, but since it wasn’t embedded into their process to be tracked, and was being driven by one individual to be tracked, it fell off from being considered an important item. The new leadership group is now going back to review this topic and get back to the improved state.

Conclusion

I hope these points help you out as you are starting your own journey with your teams. Just remember the key points: 

• What’s your starting point? Know your current state baseline.

• Where are you going? Develop your Future State.

• Who’s going with you? Cross-functional participation.

• Who’s informed you are heading out? Stakeholder support.

• Don’t leave your wallet at home? Sustain momentum.

Author Bio

Joe Adam is currently a Maintenance & Engineering Manager, a CMRP, and CRL, who has experience in various industries leading teams within maintenance, engineering, and operations within manufacturing. 

You can follow Joe on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-adam-crl-cmrp-13a0a923/