The true cost of poor quality | Hydrocarbon Processing | April 2015.
Good article on using RCA to drive production/operations improvement.
Category: Reliability
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Involving your maintenance consultants
At many installations a significant level of effort is provided by the external resources of maintenance and reliability consultants.
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Failure Analysis of ‘Near Misses’
The upside of condition-based monitoring and digital control systems is that they are proactive in preventing failure but the downside is they frequently mask the cause of failures.
These near misses should be treated as failures and analysed as such.
It is important that every touch/visit/intervention on the equipment is recorded in the CMMS, e.g. trips and resets are not general duties for the electrical crew, they should be recorded as corrective work in the CMMS against the equipment involved. They are frequently an indicator of a problem elsewhere.
It is often impractical and there is a lot of resistance to raising a new work order in these instances for each return visit to the kit to reset, but the simple solution is to raise one corrective work order against the equipment and record each intervention against it until the problem is fixed. A failure problem/cause recorded as ‘Unknown’ should not be acceptable to supervisors/management looking for improvement.
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The Concept of NEGATIVE WORK
There is a lot of interesting discussion and theory around staff resistance to maintenance program initiatives regarding buy-in, training and supporting the maintenance program, however I think the simple insight is that the Supervisors and Technicians have seen it all many times before. Hence the negativity.
Over the years they have survived new systems and business processes and watched management initiatives come and go. Most of which from their perspective increased their workload rather than reduced it.
The ‘Dilbert Principle’ comes into play – ‘If you’re a surgeon, it takes a great deal of skill and intelligence to perform an organ transplant. It is much less challenging to write a mission statement for the hospital that explains your deep desire to avoid killing patients accidentally.’ – Scott Adams
You don’t want the administrator performing heart bypass surgery on you.
I believe that to achieve ‘buy-in’ from the workforce to continuous maintenance improvement you have to change management behaviour around the maintenance processes.
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Will You Ever Fly Again?
In case you need a laugh, remember:
It takes a college degree to fly a plane but only a high school diploma to fix one..