Dear All,


I would like to gather as much info as possible on how to turn a reactive maintenance structure into a proactive in nature.

lets face it, humans are more reactive than proactive, we go to the dentist when our tooth aches, schools teach us how to assemble, disassemble and repair things, we go to a mechanic when our car is in trouble, and politicians react after a major event of media interest is happening in our country.

But if we speak about Proactiveness in the workplace, we speak of change management, KPI's or something to measure in our maintenance arena, training and education for our people, the use of RCM, PMO, RCFA, and strong managementment commitment, just what shall be your initial steps from step 1 to the last step on achieving a culture of reliability and proactive maintenance. Appreciate any response from the group.


Rolly Angeles

I thought you implement TPM, looking from your cv posted here? You mention RCM above, did you try or implement rcm?

Do you use reliability engineering techniques extensively to ascertain preventive maintenance plans?

Yes Josh, I've implemented TPM. Just want to gather some inputs since Im develoing a training module on Proactive Maintenance, maybe some post might be of value

Not exactly know what info you require but I thought TPM covers proactive maintenance, doesn't it?

By proactive maint, I understand we will need to shift from time-based preventive maint to CBM (Condition Based Monitoring) technologies to detect evident failures. Eg how to determine the shutdown interval and frequency? Most just simply set this at every 2 or 3 years without much analysis which equipment would fail by certain times. CMMS is such as imporatant tool to gather data, is it being used extensively and set correctly for this purpose (in addition to proper work management of course)?

To detect hidden failure, have to do failure finding tasks or functional tests, or trip & control instrument loop tests.

I would think having a separate maintenance planning section under Maint Dept would show strong commitment towards proactive maintenance culture.

And of course, RCA and reliability enginering should exist. Also lubrication and contamination control program should be in place before other CBMs.

CBM should be complimented by inspection such NDT. Precision maintenance should be done during repairs, overhauls, manufactures or assemblies.

Personnel competency should be top priority. Otherwise, how could we expect people to do CBM, NDT & precision maintenance without competency?

Procedures should be part and parcel of a proactive maintenance including plant change procedure to rectify any design deficiencies after determined as required.

KPIs are required for guiding towards the right direction.

Operators should be part of proactive maint by doing front line maint tasks, adhering to equipment duty/standby policy, avoiding maloperations etc.

Anyway, a lot of articles in www.plant-maintenance.com for details.

Above are my rumblings. It would be interesting to see your write up to see whether we think more or less around the same thing.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Josh,

Tks for your infor Josh. Majority of industries remain reactive despite their best initiatives on maintenance. When a failure occur maintenance will be on 2 sides on the left side where we can anticipate the occurence of a failure or most of the time on the right side where failure will occur first and maintenance will react upon it. But how can we implement a proactive maintenance when most of the time they are reactive.

TPM, RCM, CBM, Contamination Control, RCFA, CMMS are cool but they will never be the priority in a reactive domain and when priorities rank in Productivity and Output will superceed everything and for maintenance it will be how fast they react and repair failures.
This is the reality of nature in operations
So how can we change this culture when resources are often taken down by failures, how can we build a Proactive System of Maintenance around with the same number of resources and the same amount of time.

I would like to start with Step 1, your input Josh is already on the higher steps. How will you start. How can this be done when your manager is reactive in nature, I see most maintenance being yelled at when they are caught reading email, or sitting in an office since the mindset is that maintenance should always be in the line.

Rolly,
I need to contact you urgently. Can you send me a short e-mail at eml@effective-maintenance.com ?

Ok, I see what your position now ie how to get out of the reactive mode.

Is it really at fire fighting mode now? That everything else is neglected. No preventive maint in place as a minimum?

What industry is it?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Josh,

Rolly,
Maintenance is one of the largest controllable operating costs in capital intensive industries. It is also a critical business function that impacts on commercial risk, plant output, product quality, production cost, safety, and environmental performance. The dilemma that many of us face (and mostly not of our own doing), is that we are managers in organisations which barely have sufficient resources to keep the plant working, let alone find ways of improving reliability.
When this is the case, scarce maintenance resources are rationed and breakdowns consume resources first. Preventive maintenance suffers, which inevitably results in more breakdowns, and the cycle continues. In addition to lost productivity through unplanned maintenance, the "fix-it-quickly" mentality promotes "band aid maintenance", or temporary repairs, that often exacerbate the situation. Temporary repairs take additional labour to correct, or in the worst case, fail before correction.
Often in an effort to control costs, personnel numbers are reduced and morale declines as the fewer remaining personnel almost give up in despair. With this, work standards drop.
The vicious cycle of reactive maintenance feeds on itself with the level of reactive maintenance in such organisations being far greater than necessary. In some organisations, the situation declines to the stage that nearly all maintenance activity is breakdown work. This situation is depicted in Figure 1.
How the Problems Emerge
Problems in Design and Commissioning
Maintenance engineers commonly deal with the result of someone else's design - good or bad. When design is finished, construction starts and finishes, and the plant is commissioned. The Maintenance Engineer arrives someway through this (if he is lucky). He quickly finds himself left with a maintenance budget being used to finish off construction / over-expenditure, a plant that is going through teething problems, spares arriving in dribs and drabs and little information about plant failure modes and the effect of failure. Rarely is the plant delivered to the maintenance department with a comprehensive and well-documented maintenance requirements analysis and a maintenance plan.
Problems after Commissioning
After commissioning, (or sometimes before) the design team disbands and its members find work on new projects. The Maintenance Engineer is left to second guess the design intent, the plant limitations, the potential failure modes, and the likely consequences of them. The operations people are, at the same time, learning how to operate the plant and experimenting with it; pushing it to its limits and occasionally well over its design intent. There is limited money or time to change obvious design or maintainability problems in the new plant.
The task of defining the plant maintenance policy is a priority but a most daunting one. Whatever is achieved is done in a rush often using people in an opportunistic manner. Problems emerge right from the beginning. Typically, a rushed job with no training in RCM techniques results in the following problems:
• Task omissions where PM should be prescribed,
• Overservicing and underservicing,
• Prescribing tasks that add no value,
• Duplication of effort particularly between trades, and
• Prescribing overhaul where condition based maintenance would be far more cost effective.
Almost inevitably this situation results in a PM program that is poorly focussed.
To compound this there is usually no audit trail, and only those who wrote the policies know their rationale. It becomes nearly impossible to review the program and objectively assess its effectiveness.
Problems in Full Production
When the plant swings into full operation and breaks down, more maintenance tasks are created and some existing tasks are done more frequently. Many of these new tasks duplicate others. Often, in an attempt to be seen to be doing something about high profile reliability problems, maintenance personnel create and perform tasks supposed to prevent the failures but which, in reality, serve no real purpose.
Rather than being rationalised, the maintenance program grows, and this impacts on the availability of the asset for its intended purpose – production. Production managers become reluctant to cooperate with the maintenance program, having experienced many occasions where production supplies serviceable plant to maintenance for preventive work only to receive it back in a less reliable condition than it was before the maintenance. In short, the organisation begins to behave as a reactive organisation due to the belief that there is little value in the PM program.
As the PM requirements grow they start to exceed the labour resource available. In addition production windows can shrink under pressure to meet targets. With less and less PM being done, breakdown maintenance starts to become a way of life and a culture develops where it is normal to miss PM.
The vicious cycle of reactive maintenance previously described gains momentum and becomes entrenched.
If you wish to read more on this subject, you can contact me at steve@omcsinternational.com or read papers at the following url's
Full paper
Shorter Paper

Vicious_Cycle_of_Reactive_Maintenance.jpg (71 Kb, 29 downloads) Figure 1 - Vicious Cycle of Reactive Maintenance

Rolly,
If you would like someone to present these papers to your company we have a joint venture company in Manila - OMCS Philippines. I am sure someone from that office can visit.
There is a big project happening at Shell Philippines Exploration. You might be interested in taking a look at what is happening there.
Also there will be training courses being run in Manila aimed at this very subject. The dates are 29 and 30 Jan 2007.
Hope you make contact.
Rgds
Steve

Hello Steve,

I do not represent any company, I work as an independent reliability consultant by providing technical training on Reliability and Maintenance best practices, there are companies that hire me that are interested in my courses on maintenance. Here are a list of my trainings on maintenance :

1) Lubrication Strategy - Understanding Tribology and Oil Contamination Control
(Duration is 2 to 3 days)

2) Meaningful Measures of Equipment's performance (Duration is 1 or 2 days)

3) Planned Maintenance 4 Phases to Zero Unplanned Breakdown ( Duration 2 or 3 days)

4) Understanding Total Productive Maintenance - JIPM Approach ( Duration 3 days)

5) Understanding Condition-Based Mainteannce - Total Approach to failure Prediction and Analysis ( 2 or 3 days)

6) Understanding TPM's Focused Improvement - Kobetsu-Kaizen Pillar ( 1 day)

7) Reliability-Centred Maintenance (SAE JA1011)
(Duration 3 days)

8) Optimizing Equipment's Reliability (Duration 3 days)

9) World Class Maintenance Management - The 12 Disciplines ( Duration 3 days)

10)Understanding Autonomous Maintenance Steps 1 to 3 of Jishu-Hozen ( 2 days)

11) Understanding The Relationship Between Equipment Losses and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (Duration 2 days)

12)Root Cause Failure Analysis - Waging War With Failures ( Duration 2 days)

13)Basic Hydraulics - Theorym Principles and Application (Duration 1 day)

14) Understanding Proactive Maintenance - Achieving A Culture Of Reliability

Thanks for the article, I have read them and also your argument with John Moubray on RCM and PMO on Plant-Maintenance. A Great exchange of views from 2 giants on maintenance.

Best wishes,

Rolly Angeles

Hello Vee,

I have replied to you in your yahoo mail and your email you mentioned below, kindly mail me in private regarding your concern and how I can assist you.


Rolly Angeles

I think it all starts with finding a problem to solve. You've got to solve the manager's problem and make his life better. Until he has an interest, and it has to be in his interest, to make maintenance and reliability more proactive rather than reactive, then I believe you'll always fight a very uphill battle.

You probably have to start small and build a case out of a small success perhaps over several months or longer, then be able look what happened when we were more proactive, can't we try it somewhere else or perhaps on a larger scale.

Without top management saying "we're going to be proactive" you can't be too dogmatic and insist that things be done the "Proactive" way all the time. You'll need to compromise.

Overall, you have to keep talking, communicating, and promoting the benefits of proactive maintenance and the small successes you have.

Dear Joe,


I agree with you 100% that this is a very uphill battle and its like climbing a very stiff mountain.

Most manufacturing I consult with have their maintenance reports to operations wherien operations are not really technical people, to me this is a very biGGGGGGGG problem. I think everything will have to do with how the maintenance department is being organized. If maintenance reports to the maintenance department then proactiveness has a chance to grow, while if maintenance reports to operations then this is where the problem will be.

I would like to provide a typical example, and I would like to share your point of view. Most industry have a Preventive Maintenance system in place which schedules equipment's for some form of replacements and overhauls.

Now in a typical manufacturing firm, one station have around 10 similar or identical equipment's at hand producing the same product all the time, each of these machines have their own set of schedule on when it will be pulled out for some sort of PM activities.

The line had been running for a couple of years now and based from history records, machine 4 and 5 suffers from breakdown a lot averaging around 5 to 8 failures a month the rest of these machines perform well with some experiencing around a minimum of 1 failure a quarter.

My question :

A PM schedule and lists of activities had been derived to include inspection, replacement and overhauling on the part being serviced. This month the equipment's scheduled for PM will be machine 6 and 7.

1st : Would this equipment's require the same amount of Preventive maintenance activity ?

2nd : Should we follow the procedure and perform PM on machine 6 and 7 which has a lesser failure since this is the machine scheduled for PM or we apply common sense
and focus more our maintenance for machine 4 and 5 since this is the most troublesome equipment and perform light maintenance on the rest of the machines ?

3rd Should the amount of Preventive Maintenance requirements and activities be the same for all the equipment's whether problematic or not ?

THis is one of the problems in manufacturing as I see it, they will comply and follow the schedule and prioritize to perform the PM on the scheduled machine rather on the machine that really needs to be maintained.

Here comes the funny part, If we follow common sense, then Quality Control department to issue non-compliance to the maintenance department for not following the specs and procedures and missing out the PM for the month

I believe you have to follow the plan. If the plan is not working it should be revised.

Some type of Root Cause Analysis should be performed on the machines not performing well (4 and 5) or possibly on the PM those machines are receiving. Is the plan at fault or execution of the plan?

This obviously takes some extra resources. However, if you abandon the plan, won't operations be able to say, "you really don't need to do that maintenance now because your proved you're overmaintaining the machines when you didn't do PM on machines 6 and 7, (assuming they don't fail). If they were to fail without PM being done, then you're really in trouble IMHO.

It seems a new plan needs to be developed for machines 4 and 5 because the current plan does not work as well as you would like it to.

I think in general, identical machines for assembly lines should have the same PM but may need to check different operator skills, machine workloads, circumstances surrounding them, production needs, etc. Maybe a comparison study is necessary if there is really a difference in performance or reliability between identical machines. However, identical equipment with a duty/standby operations will receive different PMs as discussed in other threads.

Yes, a plan is made to be followed but it's not cast in stone ie it can be adapted for practical purposes via a variance change control to capture proper justifications for doing so.

About not following specs & procedures and missing PM for the month, again if variance such as postphonement of PM on other machines due to attending to the broken machine & to keep up production figures and thus skipping the PM for the smooth running machines, then a variance control should be raised for agreement and information by all stakeholders such as the quality control dept.

The common sense like "Do what you write and write what you do" appears not practical sometimes and prevent workers' good inputs at work place, unless the procedures have been perfected over times.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Josh,