How many engineers do you know who are passionate about people?  How many are extroverted, good communicators and charismatic?  I’d say that they are as rare as hen’s teeth (and are probably working in sales roles).  I believe however, there are technically and interpersonally skilled people are out there; they just need to be coached, mentored and developed. Honestly recognising this issue is the first step to improvement.

At the coal face, or manufacturing bench, most engineers get promoted for solving a problem, ramping up production or doing what they do best, improving the bottom line. Sadly though, they rarely get any training or decent mentoring for the people management / interaction side of their role(s).

At best engineers may go for an MBA at night or online, at worst they get to go on a one or two day course on personality profiling.  The common result is most companies have a management layer(s) that has technical or business skills but not the interpersonal skills or experience to lead their people.

Having worked all over the world and across several industries, I find this lack of people skills in technical management roles is a disease that no company seems to be immune to.  Sadly I personally can only count a few leaders that I would work for again. Management styles seem to fluctuate between timid and tyrannical and regardless of which type of manager you have, your production teams ultimately run the shops.

Like it or not, the truth of the matter is management get the labour they deserve.  Timid managers avoid tackling behaviours and conflict. Tyrannical leaders use micro managing or controlling tactics.  You get either a jelly fish or a brick wall.  When this is the case, bad behaviour begins, as leadership fails to motivate and connect the team to the common goals of the company.

When poor practices are accepted or left to continue, especially if it is safety or quality related, a cancerous complacency builds in your organisation.  The good people get beaten back by the pervasive negative culture.  Respect is lost for management and the customer.  Trust disappears, motivation decays.  None of this is culturally conducive to growth, improvement or profit.  In the current economic climate if this exists in your workplace it could prove to be fatal.

Managers need to be both technically savvy and passionate about people to optimise the man machine interface.  They also need courage, commitment and confidence to tackle the tough stuff, the toughest of which is change.  Change is inevitable when you improve things as it means you need to do something differently to get a better result.

Change or cancer, one will kill you the other will make you stronger, what do you chose?

acm are as passionate about people as they are about machines.  For strategy and support on how to take on change and lasting improvement at your coal face contact us.

Image Credit: lumaxart

If your business is dependent on plant for production, you are potentially susceptible to an extended downtime, safety or environmental event from a single high impact plant failure that could have a significant impact on business profit and continuity.  Therefore it is critical that plant is maintained in a way that avoids these high impact failures.

Traditionally the use of RCM has been focused on designing maintenance regimes that achieve high plant reliability.  This will generally identify normal maintenance requirements, but can pay insufficient attention to identifying and managing the risk high impact failures as they are generally long interval low probability events that are hard to identify and analyse.

The good news is standard RCM already has the tools to address these high loss incidents if the right approach is adopted.  The Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) which forms the heart of RCM can consider these failures provided you have an understanding of their characteristics.  Our experience shows that these failure modes (eg fatigue, corrosion, and insulation breakdown) generally have the common features of being:

• Hidden from physical human view requiring special equipment and access to detect,
• Long durations between failures normally running into years or decades,
• A high degree of uncertainty as to the mean time between failure and the potential to functional failure interval,
• Be subjected to many PM inspections that return no failure indications before some sign of the potential failure.

By being aware of these characteristics and the corresponding uncertainties such as how to determine an inspection frequency; the RCM practitioner can develop plant maintenance regimes that address these high impact failure risks and manage their risk to the overall business.

For more on how acm can help you with using RCM generally and specifically as a risk management tool please visit RCM at acm.

Operational objectives must begin with Management Commitment and Leadership. Clearly, maintenance performance must start with a highly visible backing and support from the top - the greater the gap, the greater the level of commitment required.  A Maintenance Policy needs to be developed and implemented, which promotes a common purpose for all operations (production and maintenance) personnel.  The Organisation Structure must be flexible, allowing open participation from the entire workforce, in order to achieve operational requirements in the most timely and cost effective manner.  Control of maintenance must be developed through a work-load management system incorporating work flows, organisational responsibilities and work guidelines.

Maintenance enhancement review and performance analysis needs to be established through a TQM styled process which facilitates continuous improvement to achieve optimum equipment and resource performance. A system of analysis and evaluation of equipment history, along with document and maintenance records control should be entrenched in the culture of the operation. Regular internal and external maintenance system audits are required in order to prevent decay, ensure compliance and motivate system improvements.

Best practice requires an efficient and effective financial control policy and system which tracks all maintenance related costs to enable accurate management reporting and decision making.  This system needs to incorporate spares procurement and inventory management, together with Life Cycle Budgeting. Best practice cost management will incorporate the full implementation and use of a Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS) to enable effective analysis of maintenance and equipment performance.

Planning is a highly critical system element of maintenance management.  The most successful operations have developed a strategy based maintenance plan, incorporating continual improvement and preventative/predictive activities that are linked to the corporate business plan.  Operational analysis tools are required to increase the awareness and understanding of equipment performance capabilities that are matched with operational goals and to implement Condition Based Monitoring in order to predict equipment condition and enable corrective response actions.  Planning will incorporate the use of contracted service providers to supplement the internal workforce, allowing them to focus on the core maintenance activities of critical equipment items.  Maintenance Planning and Scheduling is a vital ingredient in order to develop the most cost effective and prioritised work order schedule to make best use of all available resources.

Finally, we all recognise the critical importance of Safety and Training.  Best Practice organisations have highly developed Standard Procedures and Job Instructions that are continually updated to minimise variations from quality and safe practices.  Safety management and awareness training is ongoing, along with skills development training which enable individuals to reach their full potential and keep up with technological advances.  Quality systems are developed in accordance with Best Practice requirements.

These elements have not been addressed in any order of priority.  The interconnections and feedback flows of data between processes form the dynamics of the system.  The delays between outcome and consequential responses / actions taken form the behaviour of the system.  These twenty two elements must be managed collectively, and can be used to measure progress towards, delivery of ‘operational excellence’.

How well is your operation addressing the elements of the maintenance management system?

Business success is achieved by performing to agreed goals. To realise business success Management Commitment and Leadership should be applied according to a specific hierarchy of performance categories associated with business goals. The suggested performance hierarchy is safety, quality, cost and volume.

The safety performance category includes safety of the individual and the environment. Quality is an even broader performance category. This includes quality of operation output, quality of activity and outcomes, and quality of internal competencies and skills. Safety is paramount since good performance enables an operation to deliver quality. Management Commitment and Leadership in the areas of safety and quality deliver lowest unit output cost. Consequently, volume performance can then be readily adjusted to ensure minimal inventory and delivery managed according to market pull.

Management commitment provides the means and support for individuals within an operation to deliver performance that translates into achievement of goals. You know you have management commitment when the necessary resources and time are always made available. You know you have management commitment when managers deliver regular and consistent messages that encourage individuals to strive to achieve goals and also recognise good performance. Management Commitment means that routine and consistent effort is made to ensure everyone does understand operational performance goals and priorities, and how they as individuals contribute to achieving required performance. Business success and continual improvement however, come from leadership.

Leadership must be provided by the various teams within an operation. Teams of individuals are given responsibility and accountability for delivering their goals. Teams are linked and coordinated by team leaders operating as members of higher level teams. This leadership structure is needed to coordinate the efforts of teams to deliver goals in a proactive manner. This structure also provides the means for communication up and down the operation to assess performance against achievement of goals and manage progress regarding improvement activity. This means team members take leadership to identify opportunities for improving as part of routine activity and actively participate in implementation of improvements. In this way, managers share leadership with workers to realise performance goals.

So if you have consistent messages, recognise and reward performance focused on outcome targets, and availability of resources and time from organisational managers you have Management Commitment. If your people actively participate with management to set goals, review performance, execute activity, and implement improvement you have Leadership. In combination, you have Management Commitment and Leadership. How does your operation compare?

Pundits suggest that establishing a proactive operation culture where maintenance and production people work in cooperation is the Holy Grail [*]. You’ve got to be kidding! Production and maintenance working in cooperation is fundamental to operational performance.

Management commitment and leadership is essential so production and maintenance can cooperate; it was necessary in the past and still is today. The difference is that today an operation is far more automated and relies on less people to deliver increased levels of output creating a greater need for cooperation of production and maintenance.

One of the reasons why a reactive culture is prevalent in so many operations is because management apply logic associated with the division of labour and management theory derived from the industrial age. Managers today are under the same pressure to achieve profit targets as their predecessors were and similarly demand action from their personnel. The problem, both then and now, is that the resources and support essential to long term, stable operation performance are not provided.

Operational goals are more often associated with production activity (output) without proper regard to maintenance activity; personnel are driven to focus their actions to minimise the duration of any operational delay. These repeated actions become habit and ultimately define the prevailing culture; “we have the best response and recovery time in the industry”.

Managers become aware their operation is reactive and recognise this needs to change. They recognise that a proactive culture is fundamental to achieving Operational Excellence. They attempt to improve performance by introducing key performance indicators (KPI) and then set goals along with orders that people must achieve performance considered consistent with Operational Excellence. This is where the effort to shift from a reactive to proactive culture fails; despite even more attention, the situation does not improve or the problem becomes worse!

Culture is defined by attitude and habits; habits are displayed as actions; actions are shaped by managing performance to achieve outcomes. Management leadership and commitment of resources is the essential ingredient in empowering people to break reactive habits and stay focused on proactive actions. Establishing leadership and providing necessary resources is hardest when output is below target and budgets are tight.

If your operation culture seems to be stuck in the reactive domain then appropriate management commitment and leadership is what you need. What does management commitment and leadership mean? Stay tuned for the answer and how you know if it exists within your operation.

* S Badman, The Holy Grail of Maintenance Planning: Integrating with Operations, Originally presented at ICOMS 2007 and published in Asset Management & Maintenance Journal, Vol 21 No 2 pp 8 - 15

Many businesses endeavour to measure business performance by using Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).  The theory being that these performance measurements will expose both achievements and short comings and allow managers to take targeted action to improve the performance for which they are responsible.

At first glance this sounds like a great and relatively simple method to manage and increase performance, and it certainly is!

However the introduction of KPI’s can raise issues for the managers who are responsible for ensuring the business meets several KPI’s. We have seen (and have experienced ourselves) that once you start to measure and set targets for a number of KPI’s, managers have to be able to work out how to influence these KPI’s and how targeting one KPI may affect another KPI.

An example scenario: You are the maintenance manager for the xyz widget factory and have a plant availability target of 95% and an actual availability of 92% so desire an increase of 3%.   You also know you spend 50% of your trade people’s effort on Preventative Maintenance and have 6% of downtime due to breakdowns.  How do you determine what needs to be done to meet your availability target?

This is where you need a mental model of the business system or process that is being measured for KPI’s. The model provides a means to understand how the different KPI’s interact and what pulling one lever will do to the remainder of the system.

An example model: acm have developed a model called acmPelorus for maintenance management KPI’s that identifies which levers to pull to influence maintenance performance and how pulling these levers may impact performance in other areas.  Figure 1 below shows a graphical display from this model.

Figure 1: Maintenance KPI Model

This model has been used by one of our customers to highlight how their ability to plan work significantly influenced their ability to control breakdown maintenance.  They were not getting defects identified by operators and trade people during PM’s fixed in time before they actually stopped the plant.

The provision of a model to evaluate KPI’s will enable business managers to readily identify the most appropriate improvement opportunities and to quickly and precisely address performance issues.

Useful Links and Reference

• For more information on KPI’s, models and theoretical underpinning Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), Mental Model & Theory of Constraints at Wikipedia,
• For details of acm’s unique maintenance KPI model please go to acmPelorus,
• acm’s maintenance KPI model is built from the theory of constraints a management theory introduced by Dr E M Goldratt in the book The Goal.

The increasing need for organisations to be responsive and competitive requires a new approach to leadership, one that considers managing the capability of both the hard (plant) and soft (people) assets.

The maintenance function is typically a technical environment, the realm of engineers and tradesmen. When implementing improvement, it is quite often an incomplete understanding of the complexities of culture and how to change it, that undermines improvement efforts.

Culture is actually quite complex, it operates across many levels and is largely intangible (see figure 1). Unless it promotes the behaviours necessary for achieving success, it can become a liability.

Figure 1: The Onion Model of Organisational Culture

The following table briefly compares the features of a reactive maintenance culture with a predictive maintenance culture across some of the levels shown in figure 1.

You can bet that there is a significant shift required to move from reactive to predictive maintenance. It also becomes obvious why an improvement strategy like “let’s just send all the planners to some training and then they can put in place the predictive maintenance system” is almost certain to fail.

Successful cultural change involves aligning all the stakeholders impacted by; their identity (what is my role), values (what is important), beliefs (what is the best way to maintain our equipment), knowledge and skills (know-what and know-how) and ultimately their behaviours to be successful.