The Strategic View by Ron Doucet P. Eng.

Transition From Breakdown to Reliability - Ron Doucet

It would be unrealistic to cover the entire process of transforming an area from a breakdown environment to a proactive Work Management Process (WMP) in one short article. Achieving this involves the proper implementation of hundreds of critical activities that all have to be done correctly for the effort to succeed.

Implementing the proactive six block WMP (shown below) does not seem daunting at first, yet underestimating and under resourcing this effort is what most organizations do. The result being that most WMP implementations fail.

Once one realizes how many activities have to come together to make this work, it could become overwhelming figuring out how and where to begin. This article will focus on the initial steps down the path to reliability.

Unfortunately there are no silver bullets. The details of how work is going to be identified, planned, scheduled, executed, analysed and improved will be different for each area. A one size fits all at the execution level does not exist. On the other hand what does fit all organizations, at a higher level, is the six block model.

There are various approaches to starting this initiative. There is the Top Down “tell you how to do it” mandated approach, the Bottom Up “tell us how to improve maintenance” approach or a hybrid with a mix of mandates in terms of direction and goals set by management and getting the required input from the people closest to the assets.

Both the Top Down and Bottom Up approaches usually end up failing. The Top Down approach usually fails due to a lack of buy-in to generic work management processes, and they are usually overly focused on the maintenance software. The Bottom Up approaches usually fail due to a lack of focus on improving work practices. Both the Top Down and Bottom Up approaches inadequately deal with the required changes, in the maintainers and operators work practices, that are required if there are to be changes in equipment performance.

In the hybrid approach, management and the people closest to the assets each have a role. Managements’ role is to define the direction, criteria and goals of the new WMP. Management can mandate the transition to a proactive WMP. The details of this mandate should be no lower than at the six block model along with the expected criteria of the proactive WMP. Examples of what could be detailed as expectations are;

• Work is scheduled for one week at a time.

• The schedule is issued in the previous week.

• Work will be scheduled daily and account for all schedulable resources.

• Preventive maintenance tasks and Pre Operational checks will target the identification of future plan-able work by looking for potential failures.

• All work will be planned and archived in the CMMS.

• All work plans will have Safe Operating Procedures.

The next step is to assemble a representative team of supervisors, planners, operators and trades people and educate them on the function of maintenance. In a proactive WMP the function of maintenance is to maintain equipment functionality and not just to fix it when it breaks. 

Operators and maintainers need to understand their role in early work identification and the resulting benefits of planning and scheduling. Remembering what John Moubray once said, “First change the way people think and then apply the changed thinking to doing something different”. This is where the change in thinking occurs. This may be the first time that the maintainer is asked to look for future plan-able work instead of broken equipment. It may be the first time that the operator or attendant is asked to report symptoms instead of what is broken on his equipment.

Once everyone is clear what a proactive work management process is, it is now time, and now possible, to use the changed thinking to determine who does what and how, for each block of the six block model such that the WMP expectations are met. This should be done in a facilitated session with the trades and operational people who know the equipment best, along with the supervisors, planners and schedulers who will have to manage the process.

With this method, even though the six block WMP model was mandated, the actual work processes that come out of this exercise are developed and owned by the people involved. The outcomes are clear roles, accountabilities and processes for all involved in managing assets proactively.

Now the real work starts.

To meet the criteria for Work Identification, current and new PM tasks and pre operational checklists will have to be improved to reflect the need to identify potential failures, and a means to get this information to a planer will have to be determined, etc. For Work Planning, job plans will have to be documented, parts lists updated, equipment hierarchy updated and created, etc. For Scheduling, there will be a need to develop coordination processes, staging areas, scheduling systems etc. 

Implementation activities will be required for each block. These activities and processes will be specific to the area and reflect its unique operating context.

Some critical success factors using this methodology is that firstly the work processes and implementation activities are determined by the people involved who are familiar with the requirements of a proactive WMP. Secondly the WMP reflects the unique operating context of the area and thirdly the work practices, between man and machine, physically changes. With Buy-in, applicable WMP’s and changes in work practices, equipment performance now can also be expected to improve and be sustained.

We will cover the details of each block in upcoming articles but suffice to say that a project of this size is not successfully managed in an ad hoc fashion. There should be resources made available to oversee the entire implementation and resources made available to participate in all the required improvements. Sound project management principles need to be used, as the amount of parallel activities required to implement this in a reasonable timeframe will become unmanageable very quickly.

Please email me your comments on this article, on asset management topics you would like to see in the future or any questions you may have.

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.