Manufacturers deploy corporate reliability programs for many reasons. Not only do such programs encourage achievement of environmental, health and safety (EHS) targets, they drive gains in uptime and capacity. Importantly, they also enable the formation of a needed reliability culture that standardizes the response to maintenance and reliability issues.
Successful deployment of a reliability-improvement initiative depends on corporate and business-unit leadership, followed by the appropriate program design. This means including program elements that are right for the operation, supporting the culture needed to focus on defect elimination, learning to proactively determine equipment condition and having company-wide buy-in.
The top two levels of a corporate reliability program—values and policies—belong to a company’s senior management. Values define the corporation through its vision and mission. They encompass the company’s cultural and ethical focus, EHS responsibilities and how the company serves its customers. Policies are the corporation’s guidelines, which generally do not include room for deviation. Most companies have policies for EHS as well as travel, accounting, human resources and others. Most do not, however, include a Reliability Policy in their mix.
For any capital-intensive industry aimed at guiding the response to maintenance and reliability issues, a Reliability Policy should exist that connects expected behaviors with the business case for improving the reliability of the equipment assets and the manufacturing process. Adherence to the policy should carry the same weight as all other company policies.
The Reliability Policy should provide clear line-of-site objectives from company values through to maintenance delivery. It connects and gives purpose to the execution of the asset-care plans for its equipment. The Policy standardizes the response for maintenance and reliability practices through guidelines for maintenance and reliability principles, criteria and work practices (setting minimum expectations), along with focus areas for improvement (such as equipment uptime). It should describe a measurement system that enables users to determine if progress is being made toward the time horizon established for reliability improvement.
Principles and best practices
The two levels below Policy are “Principles and Criteria,” followed by “Best Practices.” Principles are the highest level of guidance that can be offered regarding the minimum set of practices a site should be implementing. This can include basics such as defect-elimination, criticality, attached bill of materials for critical assets, specific use of certain CMMS functionality, and lubrication and greasing practices, to name a few. It’s important, however, to stop guidance at this level. Being overly prescriptive can be detrimental to sites developing “pockets of excellence” in their implementation. They need to figure out how to meet the guiding principles.
Best Practices are the “property” of the manufacturing sites and their various networks. They can be organized along the same lines as the Principles by company focus areas, work processes or by accepted industry standards (such as SMRP’s Five Pillars: Business and Management, Manufacturing Process Reliability, Equipment Reliability, Organization & Leadership, and Work Management). They can detail how a practice will be executed, such as in the following example for critical equipment lists:
- All equipment within the production facility, including rotating and fixed equipment, structures, systems and other components (electrical, mechanical, instrumentation), has been evaluated and processed through the critical equipment evaluation.
- The critical equipment list is available and used in establishing priorities for preventive maintenance activities, condition monitoring activities and spare-parts inventory decisions.
- The critical equipment list is used to prioritize maintenance tasks.
- Failure of a piece of critical equipment triggers a detailed assessment of the failure, such as an RCA or RCM.
The advantage to identifying Best Practices is that with consistency comes the ability to develop reliability skill levels, ease the transfer of personnel from one site to another, perform comparisons of performance across sites and accelerate the results needed to meet the business challenge stated through the Reliability Policy. This ultimately achieves higher uptime, higher productivity, lower operating costs and a more predictable supply-chain performance.
Implementation
Implementation starts with the Board of Directors. Generally, a sponsor in the manufacturing organization understands and is willing to develop the business case and present it to the business leadership. This senior sponsor understands the impact a standardized response to maintenance and reliability can have on the company’s performance. Generally, he or she gets tasked with connecting the business performance imperatives to the outcomes of a Reliability initiative. In addition, the sponsor identifies candidates to lead the initiative and those in individual business units to carry out its implementation.
Those who lead these types of initiatives should be expected to perform the following:
- Maintenance, Reliability and Site Manager duties, preferably with multi-site experience
- Develop strategies to accelerate and improve current maintenance and reliability performance
- Deploy the appropriate metrics to measure performance
- Optimize CMMS utilization
- Drive the execution of asset-care strategies
- Integrate reliability into capital projects with engineering
- Define and roll out plan for asset-reliability issues
- Recruit, hire and supervise reliability resources
- Support plant-reliability improvement efforts globally
- Improve the company’s competency in reliability for engineers, craft and operators
- Drive risk out of fixed equipment with risk-based methods
Once the leadership structure and responsibilities are established at senior levels in the company and in the business units, subject-matter experts should be identified for the various aspects of maintenance and reliability practices. This should include those with expertise in maintenance execution, planning and scheduling, reliability engineering, defect elimination and materials management (stores). Next, a small team including the executive sponsor should “craft” the Reliability Policy and the Principles and Best Practices to be followed. A review period for all stakeholders should be conducted and allowed to run its course to achieve understanding and buy-in.
Most important to the success of this effort is having the right metrics. The fewer metrics developed the better. Dashboards should be set up along with recording systems for a few lagging metrics. Lagging metrics are better recorded and reported at the business-leadership and corporate level to measure progress, while leading metrics are best for the smaller enterprises to decide and report at the manufacturing-site level. Reporting of lagging metrics should be less frequent (quarterly) than leading metrics (weekly) at the sites.
