By now there is probably not a maintenance or reliability practitioner in the world who doesn't know about the maintenance maturity approach.
Starting out in the late 1980's this approach was publicized widely by Terry Wireman in one of his early books, and it has been plagiarized mercilessly ever since unfortunately.
You know the one right - you start at reactive, work through planned to precision and then reliability or world class. (Or some variation of these)
The problem, and there are a few, is that most consultants and even practitioners tend to start offering services around the reliability or precision part of the scale. Yet there are often gigantic benefits to be had by focusing on the basic elements of maintenance.
Things like eliminating or reducing vibration, implementing good and useful condition monitoring, clean equipment, operators trained in basic maintenance and adjustments and so on.
Then there's the planning side of things. Capacity scheduling, delay elimination or minimization, recording and capturing data in an effective and useful manner.
The whole maintenance maturity thing is great - that's why it has been ripped off so many times - but lets not forget that the early steps are often the most beneficial and contain the most value. Particularly if things have been allowed to drift for a while.
Good post.
ReplyDeleteJust as a building can't stand without a foundation, neither can a maintenance organization. Deciding to do TPM or RCM when you don't even have a rational WO process is a sure fire prescription for failure.