The Strategic View by Ron Doucet

Guest columnist Ron Doucet is a reliability professional with a long career of driving companies towards operational excellence. He is an Aladon trained RCM practitioner, frequent conference speaker, and currently holds a senior asset management position in the mining industry of North America.

Welcome to the inaugural launch of The Strategic View column. This monthly column will explore the topic of asset management improvement by examining causes of unreliability, and the realities of addressing the underlying issues in an operating environment that most of us experience each and every day.

The causes of unreliability are almost endless starting at the procurement/engineering stages right on through to how maintenance is performed, how the equipment is operated and eventually disposed. Some issues are organizational, behavioural and cultural.

With the safety performance and profitability of so many companies being dependent on the performance of their assets, it may be surprising to some that asset management principles for the most part have not been anchored into companies’ governance policies. For those that have adopted clear asset management principles, the realities of making the transition are more often that not misunderstood, thus making the implementation of good asset management strategies and the associated benefits less likely to succeed and be realized.

Making successful improvements in an operating site requires good change management and practices. This applies to all changes including changes to the maintenance tasks, operating practices, change in roles, changes in SOP’s, mission statements, procurement policies, organizational changes, spares policies etc.

Early in my asset management career, the late John Moubray once told me that the secret to change management is “to change the way people think and then apply the changed thinking to doing something different”. Circumnavigating the world is unfathomable if the world is thought to be flat. Likewise, implementing maintenance improvements at all level will be unsuccessful if the accepted truth is that the function of maintenance is to “fix things”.

We procure assets for what they do, not what they are. Yet too often, the focus of maintenance right after the acquisition is focused on maintaining what the asset is as opposed to maintain what the asset does.

Maintain means to “cause to continue” or “to keep going”. As it pertains to assets. The primary function of maintenance is to cause any asset to continue to do what its users wants it to do. In other words the function of maintenance is to preserve the function of the asset, not to “fix’ the asset.

It is this changed thinking from preserving the asset to preserving the function of the asset that will allow real bottom up and top down maintenance improvements to take hold. How to get everyone to understand this will be the subject of another article.

As mentioned earlier, this column will focus on the implementation of sustainable asset management improvements and I will refer often to the concept of maintaining the function of assets and the need for this to be a common understanding at the level at which the maintenance improvement is sought.

With your feedback, comments, suggestions and questions I hope to be able to address some of the main issues affecting equipment performance and generate some real world solutions.