3sixty solution llc

I would be surprised if folks in operations have NOT heard the old story about filling a 5 pound bag of potatoes with 10 pounds of potatoes always results in mashed potatoes.

And I would bet that most operations people understand that releasing more work into production than what is coming out will, invariably, lead to more work in process inventory (WIP) and longer lead-times not to mention the mess and chaos creates for the organization.

You knew this, right? Either through formal education, your intuition or your experience, you realize that there is a direct relationship between production lead-time, work in process and throughput (i.e. output). Perhaps you already knew that queuing theory explains this behavior.  Little’s Law states that in a stable operation, the amount of work in process (WIP) is equal to the average Throughput of the resource multiplied by the lead-time or if you like math:

WIP = Throughput x Lead-time

While this relationship is well-known and intuitively obvious, it’s still amazing that in the dawn of 21st century, how many organizations seem to ignore this little inconvenient truth. If I had a nickel for every time I observed an organization releasing more work into the system than its output, I would have long retired.

The typical excuse I hear is that we are just trying to keep our people busy. A very innocent and worthy goal, right? And yes, the premature release of work is extremely effective in keeping people busy.

But keeping ‘busy’ and being ‘productive’ are two different things. Releasing work at a rate faster than what’s coming out of the system will indeed keep people busy. They will be busy looking for missing material, busy looking for required tools, busy rescheduling orders,  busy expediting materials, busy explaining to other customers while orders relate, busy explaining to finance why costs are so high, busy explaining the sales why lead-times are so long, busy explaining why service-level stinks. I’m sure you get the point since you most likely have been this routine at least a few times in your career.

So why do we continue to do something that we know is stupid?  Obviously it must be satisfying some human emotional need, since it cannot be justified by any rational basis. And we already suspect the likely answer - the opposite of busy is perceived as doing nothing and doing nothing is viewed as waste.  And, in these days, who wants to be viewed as waste?

We need to understand that there is a fundamental conflict at play.  On one hand, in order to be productive we should not release work early, while on the other hand, in order to be perceived as being valuable we should release work early.

This is where the art and skill of the operations professional must come into play.  Your challenge is to provide the leadership to assure that work will be released only when it’s time to be released and at same time, provide assurances to your staff that pacing release to output is not in anyway going to negatively impact their careers. In other words, sometimes it’s okay to be idle. Take this time for cross training, conduct some 5S tasks, perform some preventative maintenance etc. You can still get some value out of the idle time.

As an operational professional, you must have a clear understanding of why this vicious cycle has to be broken – this is why you get paid the big bucks to run the operation!

A Bill Of Materials (BOM) is a listing of component parts for a piece of equipment. In the CMMS system it is kept as part of the equipment file. An accurate BOM has two main uses in the maintenance function:

• It is used by maintenance planners to aid in identifying parts required and in knowing if those parts are stocked in the storeroom or if they must be ordered on a one-time basis. This helps save the planner’s time and improves the work order process.
• Maintenance technicians can use this information “in the heat of battle” to reduce the time it takes to identify and get parts, thus improving response time.

Building the BOM’s usually starts with the information contained in the equipment manual. Once the components are identified, a decision can be made about whether to make them stocked items in stores. At this point “generic” parts (like bearings, belts, and other commodity items) can be separated from those that must be ordered from the OEM.

A plant must have an understanding or philosophy about what will be contained in the BOM’s for them to be compiled in  consistent manner. Some facilities list only the stores stocked items in the BOM. Others list those plus items that would generally be replaced in a 2 to 4 year time frame. Others list all components (including bolts and other common items) so that mistakes about replacing components will not be made.

Whatever your philosophy is, it is important to include stores stock numbers for components that are stocked. This will dramatically reduce the time it takes for techs to acquire the things they need to make repairs. Training them in the search methodology is also key to success.

Keeping BOM’s current requires database maintenance, but pays dividends in improving the effectiveness of the maintenance team.

When working inside manufacturing plants, we often find evidence that maintenance and sanitation groups perform their work in isolation. Some of this evidence includes:

• Lubrication points that are extremely clean
• Equipment guards off at start-up time
• Maintenance techs complaining that “sanitation chased us off the job”
• Equipment partially disassembled, but not cleaned
• Equipment disassembled and cleaned but not reassembled
• And on and on

There is always a correct sequence of events from shut-down to start-up of the equipment. Those events often include both maintenance and sanitation tasks. It is important for these tasks to be performed in the right sequence so that;

1. The equipment really does get cleaned
2. The needed maintenance tasks are performed
3. Lubrication is performed after sanitation so that lubricants stay where they are needed, and
4. The equipment is operational at the time scheduled for production

What needs to occur is a dialogue between sanitation, maintenance, and production groups that results in an established, written schedule for the time when the equipment is down. This schedule should be communicated to everyone involved in the event. Posting it in a conspicuous place on the production floor is always a good idea.

Equipment reliability requires communication and discipline from everyone involved to produce a quality and safe product.

We encounter many manufacturing organizations that have vacancies in key positions for months while searching for the right person to permanently fill the job. Whether the vacancy is in operations, maintenance, quality control, or others, having a leadership position vacant often results in a performance downturn.

We see a trend towards filling these openings on a temporary basis with a highly experienced replacement while the candidate search is underway. There are many reasons for this trend;

• The length of the search is unknown and could last for a year or more. Having a vacuum in a leadership position places an additional burden on people in the organization which is already lean. Hiring an experienced person immediately ensures that decisions and action will continue and not default to a “do nothing” mode.
• As companies have downsized, their ability to fill jobs internally has decreased. In addition, the level of experience in organizations has declined. This has resulted in a dearth of expertise in some key areas. An experienced outsider is often more likely to understand and be able to implement best practices during an interim term. 
• Having an experienced person in the role opens up the possibility of hiring a less seasoned person who can be trained by the interim leader.
• The temporary leader often participates in the hiring process for the permanent person. This provides an additional viewpoint that can improve the chances of getting a good fit.

With the recent trend in downsizing, there are often senior people available who would like having a job that they know is temporary. Many of these experienced hands can bring skills and knowledge developed during a long career to bear to make a successful and seamless transition.

In almost all of the multi-plant systems we encounter, there are always “good” performing plants and “poor” performing plants and everything in between. One way this lack of consistency manifests itself is in the area of “best practices”. 

Typically, every plant will have practices or processes established that can be considered as best practices for the product being produced. Even the poor performers often have some areas where they are ahead of the rest of the system.

So the question becomes; “How can we communicate and adopt these best practices across all the plants, and improve the performance of the entire system?”

We recently worked with a division of a large food manufacturer that had ten plants across North America that wanted to improve the quality and consistency of the maintenance and reliability function. The answer for them was to create a Divisional Maintenance Council whose charge was to identify and share best practices across the system.

The councils’ core members are the Maintenance Manager from each plant and is facilitated by the Divisional Staff Reliability Engineer. The council meets monthly with two of the meetings each year being face-to-face, and the other ten being tele-conferences or web conferences depending on the agenda. The Maintenance Managers also invite others in the organization who can benefit from the meetings to attend. These invitees are typically; maintenance planners, operations and maintenance supervisors, production managers and engineers. 

The meetings also often have guest presenters from outside the organization to promote identification and discussion about best practices.

We all know that not improving or “standing still” is the same as going backwards given the current pace of business. Establishing a Maintenance Council is one way to insure the entire organization is discussing ways to get better and sharing learnings.

Organizations tend to grow and change in an evolutionary manner over time, rather than by deliberate, planned redesign. The responsibilities and expectations of the people, as well as the skills needed to perform the work tend to alter in the same way.

Establishing and communicating the roles of personnel, and the skills needed to accomplish the job help the organization in multiple ways;

• When selecting people for promotion or new assignments, having the responsibilities known helps employees decide if they want the job, and helps the selection process decide if they are right for the job. Identifying the skills needed helps in the same way. This can reduce the perception of favoritism and “the buddy syndrome” that often accompanies these decisions.
• The hiring process becomes more streamlined because the initial screening process will eliminate those unqualified .
• The performance of individuals can be measured more objectively when there are established criteria. Performance appraisals can be viewed as very subjective and full of surprises when standards are not established.
• Decisions about pay can be made more objectively.
•  Training and development plans can be established easily when needed skills are compared to a person’s existing skill set.

Take the time to identify the roles, responsibilities, and skills required for all the job positions in your organization. Use the people currently in the job to help do this. The process will save time in the future when decisions need to be made. It will also result in increased trust in the organization because standards have been set.

Becoming successful in improving uptime and reducing asset care costs is not just about improving the technical capabilities in the plant. We frequently encounter organizations that have good routine maintenance plans and understand planning and scheduling, but can’t move from reactive to proactive because they can’t get their planned work accomplished.

What we hear from Maintenance Leaders in these plants is “All of my guys are assigned to the lines to support production and they don’t have the time to get the planned work accomplished”. We also usually find that most of the planned work that is done is performed on the weekend when the lines are down. This leads to increased (and often excessive) overtime, which is great for the employees paychecks, but bad for their personal well being and leads to burn-out. This generally results in the weekend work being on a voluntary basis, which often means even less planned work is accomplished. This is the classic downward spiral into a completely reactive mode.

The way out of this morass is not easy because it involves making a major cultural shift in the thinking of the plant leadership group. That change is moving some of the technicians away from “line coverage” and into working nearly exclusively on planned and scheduled work. This shift is a major event in the organization because of the fear of reducing the support that is “keeping the lines running” will result in production losses. The truth is that accomplishing more planned work will, in the long run, increase the equipment uptime and result in more product out the door.  

Once the concept is embraced and the process is started, the organization almost always feels some initial pain. This usually manifests itself as complaints from both operators and maintenance technicians that they are having to work harder to keep things going, and complaints from Production Leaders about “slow response time from maintenance”. Our experience is that this goes away one to two months into the process as people begin to understand the new strategy. Plant wide communication about what is happening is key to success.

Most plants that make this transition do so by creating a group under a maintenance leader that is responsible for executing only planned work. This group usually includes the maintenance planner(s). This structural change in the organization is necessary because the old organization was perfectly structured to respond to immediate needs and only by changing the structure can new expectations of the maintenance function be carried out. Leaving the old structure in place and asking people to behave differently will result in no behavior change most of the time.

For this organizational shift to be successful, the Planned Maintenance Team must be creative about taking advantage of equipment downtime to get the work done. This may mean a change in work schedules, or being opportunistic about short downtime events during change-overs or sanitation periods, and/or other strategies that will ensure that the work gets done.

The organizational shift is not easy to sell to leadership, but once established, the power of the structural change will result in measurably improved performance.

Early warning about equipment issues can save a lot of time and money. Diagnosing and making repairs prior to equipment failure can make it possible to plan the work in advance and be ready to make the repair when the right people and materials are available. In addition, potential collateral damage can be avoided.

Paying attention to strange noises or performance of your car can reduce maintenance costs and avoid a breakdown. The same principle applies in the factory, where operators (drivers) of the equipment are the ones who spend the most time with the equipment and are the ones who will get any early warning signals about potential failure.

We must encourage operators to give us this information and make it easy to do so. Notification or work request systems must be relatively easy to access, and operators must see that they are being listened to when they communicate.  

One way to do this is in “green rooms” or shift performance and hand-off meetings. Asking about the equipment condition and performance can encourage the flow of information. Making sure these identified issues are addressed will ensure the conversation continues.

Establishing a dialog with those who run the production assets can lead to improved uptime and lower costs.

It is axiomatic that nearly all (I would guess at 99%) of the preventive maintenance work plans can be improved. We rarely have planners, supervisors, or technicians tell us that “this PM is perfect”. It is important that maintenance organizations place themselves in the mode of continuous improvement for PM routines to drive equipment  reliability.

Improvement opportunities exist in the following areas;

• Adding and deleting tasks
• Identifying incorrect part numbers
• Revising frequencies
• Clarifying task descriptions
• Improving safety instructions
• Improving set-up or other technical information
• And on and on

We believe the best way to do this is to involve the entire Maintenance organization in this effort. The reason for this is to use the experience and expertise of everyone in the organization and create a culture of constantly upgrading performance.

We recommend that Supervisors set the expectation that comments and suggestions for improving existing PM plans are a routine part of doing business.

We worked with a client recently that established the expectation that each technician would identify improvement suggestions for 3 PM work orders every week. The suggestions were hand written by the mechanics and electricians on the hard copy of the work order which was then routed back to the Planner. The Planner reviewed the comments and incorporated them into the PM plans for future use. The number of work orders that had comments written on them was tracked by technician and posted in a public place. Compliance moved to 100% in very short order.

The result is that the clients’ PM’s are in a state of continuous improvement that could not be achieved by having only Planners or some other limited group lead the effort. The more subtle result is that everyone in the organization is now engaged in driving improvement.

When we think about equipment maintenance work, we often think of it as either planned or unplanned. Planned means that someone has thought about the scope of work to be done, the skills needed, and the parts, tools, and materials needed to accomplish the work.

Let’s think about an “emergency” or reactive work situation. A technician is called to the production line to make a repair because the line is down. What does he do first? He identifies the scope of the work, what parts and materials he needs, and the tools he will require. He then proceeds to get the parts, materials and tools. Last, he actually makes the needed repair. So, in this case, the technician is the one who planned the work!

What we find is that 100% of maintenance work is planned. The questions are about who planned it and how far in advance of the job execution. These are important questions because we find that planning the work can often take between 25 and 40% of the total time required to get the job done. Notice that we are not talking about Scheduling the work. Planning and Scheduling are two entirely separate functions, even though in many organizations the same person is involved in both.

So what is the job of someone who is formally designated as a Planner? The job is to reduce the amount of time technicians spend planning to give them as much time as possible to actually perform the work. This increase in productivity of the workforce is the financial payback or justification for paying someone to be a Planner. 

Obviously, the Planner is not going to attempt to plan emergency work. What he/she will do is constantly make judgements about where to focus the planning effort. We believe that the biggest payback the Planner can provide is by focusing on the repetitive work (preventive and predictive) that is performed. This is because every technician hour that is saved is multiplied by the number of times a job is performed. So if the Planner saves a technician one hour on a monthly PM, the annual labor savings is 12 hours! When the Planner spends time on a one-time (non-repetitive) work order, the labor hours savings occurs only once.

 Getting the right work planned by the right person is critical in the maintenance function. It can make a huge difference in productivity and in outside perception about the efficiency and effectiveness of the group.