A major revolution is quietly underway in the world of maintenance. The frenetic pace of the latter part of the 20th century to escape the perceived Y2K trap by replacing traditional CMMS's with expensive integrated business solutions and the constant need to improve equipment uptime at lowest cost is necessitating radical changes in the way in which we practice maintenance.

The realization that maintenance needs to be viewed as a "Profit Center" and not a "Cost center" will serve as the main foundation. Companies which fail to grasp this simple fact will not reap the benefits of these new systems, in many cases production efficiency levels will stagnate or fall and blame will be leveled by a confused user at the system itself.

At the very outset it must be recognized that maintenance organizations must adopt a pro-active profit-focused approach to narrow the gap between manufacturing actual costs and ideal costs;

The Profit Improvement Program

This profit-focused approach to maintenance has its roots in the elements of " Total Productive Maintenance":

• Early Equipment Management and Maintenance prevention.
• Train to improve skills of all personnel involved.
• Improve Equipment efficiency.
• Involve operators in Equipment Management and Multi-tasked maintenance.
• Improve Maintenance Organization and Efficiency.

Its main driving force is a profit improvement approach based on seven simple steps. Founded on good business principles, which focus on the "bottom line" profitability of the company. The process identifies the non-value-added activities within the organization and then systematically creates and implements solutions to eliminate the waste area/s:

A cornerstone of this approach is the financial tracking of results;

• Monthly Financial Reporting
• Financial Statement Reconciliation (Confirming Savings)
• Annual Budgeting (Into Operating Budget)

To facilitate this new approach to maintenance, it is important that senior management set the overall strategic direction, not in vague key performance areas but in the formalization of quantitative objectives in a Quality, Cost, Delivery, Environment and People framework that must be cascaded down and agreed at each level of the organization:

Closing the Performance Gap

Closing the gap between ideal costs and actual costs in manufacturing requires a disciplined approach to the development, implementation and sustainment of best practices, which are pivotal to the success of any system. A downfall in most traditional manufacturing organizations is the lack of best practices, starting without these essential building blocks is akin to relying on an electronic scoreboard at a Cricket / Baseball match to win the game, without the players making or understanding their contribution.

By populating the manufacturing support systems with best practices and adopting a profit improvement approach, fast paced improvements that add profit and cost improvement in a 90 - 120 day time frames are easily realized.

Business Centered Best Practice Development.

The development of Business Centered best practices starts with a rigorous analysis of available performance data to determine the process area of highest leverage. This provides a baseline for the setting of improvement goals that are measurable, realistic and date driven following implementation of the best practices.

The best practice development process itself consists of two main categories:

Process

This methodology provides the detailed contents of an operator job model in terms of "Best Operating Practice". Information generated forms the basis of process work instructions which when complete, are loaded into ISO to prevent quality defects and secondly to provide a measurement base line for the elimination of waste and the introduction of focused non-conformances exception reporting. In addition, information generated using this process can be used to develop problem-solving guides and training material for those involved.

Following a process mapping stage, each step of the process under review is subjected to a detailed analysis to identify the process quality outputs and related waste measurement aspects, together with their respective operator controllable inputs. These outputs and inputs are then subjected to a five step questioning technique to provide the detailed contents of a job model for the operator in terms of "Best operating practice".

Step 1: Brainstorming session to identify the barriers, which currently prevent the machine/process from operating at world class standards.

Step 2: Identify all measurable outputs [i.e. Quality or waste aspects associated with the process being studied.

Step 3: Each of the identified outputs is then subjected to a structured questioning process, which results in a clear definition of what the outputs are, why they are important, who is responsible for their detection, against which standard they will be compared, when should measurements / checking take place and what method should be used.

Step 4: All operator controllable inputs which have an impact on the identified measurable outputs are identified and subjected to the same job design structured questioning process as follows:

WHAT SHOULD BE MEASURED / CONTROLLED? Give a clear description/definition of the measurable output / controllable input that every one can relate to.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT? Describe the importance of measuring the output / controlling the input and its consequences by not doing it.

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE? Identify who best can / should perform the task.

HOW SHOULD IT BE MEASURED / CONTROLLED? Identify actual method of measuring the outputs and controlling the Inputs

WHEN SHOULD IT BE MEASURED / MONITORED? Identify the frequency of control, monitor or measure.

STANDARD AGAINST WHICH MEASUREMENT WILL BE MADE: What is the standard we are going to control the inputs and measure the outputs against.

Using the structured questioning process results in a clear definition of what the operator controllable inputs are, why they are necessary, how and when they are to be done, to what standards and what and where to record the results.

Maintenance

For in-use equipment, where the age-reliability characteristics are known, the emphasis is placed on addressing the mechanism of failure itself, as opposed to the time consuming pre-identification of equipment functions and functional failure modes associated with the conventional RCM approach.

Using a screening process based on a customized form of fault tree analysis, the root causes are analyzed. Those root causes of Man, Method, Material and Measurement are prioritized and resolved using a simple Gap Management system. For the machine part root causes namely wear and other forms of deterioration, the loss of function associated with these root causes is taken through a customized version of the MSG-3 decision logic to establish the effects criticality. The root causes are then further subjected to a questioning process to select the appropriate preventative maintenance task/s for implementation.

Level 2 of the decision logic diagram as been strengthened to accommodate our ability in a non-aviation industry to visually inspect our equipment in its dynamic mode and for the operator to assume greater responsibility, there-by reducing maintenance costs further.

The many advantages realized by following this customized approach are:

• The technique can be used and owned at the lowest level in the organization.
• Analysis time is reduced significantly.
• Replication of analysis is eliminated.
• Focuses the organization on elimination of all root causes.
• Resistance to change at shop floor level is significantly reduced.

Like the ultimate machine, the perfect maintenance program does not exist, failures will occur and an organization must be prepared to embrace a disciplined approach to root cause analysis if a standard of zero failures and zero defects is to be attained.

To affect this desired behavior change, a change in paradigm at all levels of the organization is required and existing management structures need to be realigned to support this emerging culture.

Root Cause analysis.

The root cause analysis toolkit in a Business Centered Maintenance organization recognizes that root causes emanate from five sources namely: Man, Method, Material, Measurement and Machine (single cell part). It is not uncommon to find in a reactive non-best practice organization that many failures are competency based viz. 'Man' & 'Method'.

At the situational level a simple 5 why approach is followed which takes cognizance of the signs preceding the failure, team based brainstorming, evidence observed at the scene and during the corrective action phase. It must be stressed that users are only permitted to progress to each level based on physical evidence (guessing is not permitted). Supported by expert technology and integrated into the CMMS system, it is viewed as the first level in the root cause analysis journey.