Reliability Academy

Solving maintenance problems starts with yourself. As an individual, you need to be proactive. You need to take action. You need to educate yourself. And you need to challenge the status quo. Never be complacent. If you want to escape the vicious cycle of reactive maintenance... Instead of putting the blame on others or on the systems you have in place, Start by asking: “What can I do?” Sadly, I’ve seen too many people who’ve lost hope for their organisation. All they see is the chaos and turmoil of working in a reactive maintenance environment. They’ve accepted that things won’t improve. And in doing so they forgot to see that they can make a difference Even if the difference you make is small, make it regularly and it will build up over time. Over time one of your colleagues will get on board, and eventually one more. Then another. And one day you will look back and see what a difference you made. So if you’re tired of the vicious cycle of reactive maintenance... If you want to stop the firefighting… If you want to create change in your organisation... Then looking in the mirror. And the person you see is the person that can make that first change. Let us know in the comments what change you’re going to make! #maintenance #reliability #ReliabilityAcademy

Can you call your workplace a ‘stable working environment’? It’s an environment that nurtures teamwork, builds trust, and establishes shared priorities. One that lets us communicate to operations that, “Yes, the job is getting done. And you’ll get your equipment back soon”. Sadly, you can’t have a stable working environment… …when you’re too busy running around fighting fires and chasing missing parts. See, what often happens in a highly reactive maintenance environment is that maintenance is overwhelmed. Things take too long. Operations don’t get answers fast because maintenance is ‘too busy’. And since the equipment isn’t getting fixed as fast as they want it to be fixed, and there isn’t clear communication when things will be fixed… ... Operations lose ‘trust’ in Maintenance. They scream louder and louder until someone jumps and gets their equipment fixed. Sure, that’s one way to prioritise... But the problem is… that often makes the reactive environment worse. It stops maintenance from properly preparing the work and increases waste in the organisation. That’s why if you want to create a stable working environment… You first have to deal with your problem with reactive maintenance. And you can do that by effectively implementing maintenance planning & scheduling. This gives you the time and breathing room to actually sit down and communicate with the operations team. #maintenance #reliability #ReliabilityAcademy

What is your opinion of work packs? To execute maintenance tasks efficiently, your maintenance crew needs a complete work pack. That work pack should include everything a technician needs to know to do the job safely and efficiently. Nothing more, nothing less. If the work pack is incomplete, then chances are, your crew will waste their time looking for the information they need in manuals, drawings, and procedures. Or worse, they won't look for it ... Either way, without a complete work pack, you’re creating heaps of waste and inefficiencies. No a complete work pack is not necessarily a big heavy A4 binder of documents, it could be just a couple of pages of paper. That's why you want a Maintenance Planner with a solid trade background, someone who knows how to do the job and who can document it effectively. If you want to learn more about creating work packs and other responsibilities of the Maintenance Planner, then you can check the article on the first comment. Do you use work packs? How good are they? #maintenance #reliability #planningandscheduling #ReliabilityAcademy

There are many versions of maintenance planning and scheduling processes floating around. But, in essence, they all come down to the same basic phases: 1 – Identify & prioritise 2 – Plan 3 – Schedule 4 – Execute 5 – Closeout 6 – Review & improve #maintenance #planning #scheduling #planningandscheduling #workmanagement #cmms #productivity

No - elaborate solutions are NOT always the best choice.  Sure, they look colorful and flashy—but they’re not always effective. Sometimes, the best solutions... are the simplest. Sadly… humans like complex solutions. It’s our nature. You see... we have this behaviour called “Complexity Bias”. Just as buyers intuitively think a more expensive product is better than a cheap product... …people naturally think a more complex solution is better than a simple solution. That’s one reason why we engineers also love complicated solutions. Since we constantly face difficult challenges that could affect the lives of many people, we err on the side of safety, on the side of complexity. As a result… when we optimise our work processes — we routinely make things unnecessarily complicated. This is very apparent when it comes to low reliability. Even though there’s a simple and effective solution available... Too many organisations choose the complex path. That’s why you’ll see reliability models asking you to implement 10 to 20 elements to master reliability. But the problem is most companies still struggle with the simple ‘basics’ to effectively make use of these complex frameworks. That’s why I always emphasise the effectiveness of simple yet proven frameworks like the Road to Reliability. In fact, in my 20+ years of experience in the industry, I’ve seen plants improve their reliability greatly by simply doing the ‘basics’ extremely well. By focusing on the foundational elements, you can get the most results from only implementing four elements— Planning & Scheduling Preventive Maintenance Defect Elimination Leadership & Culture If you think about it, Pareto's principle can be applied here: 80% of the results (improving reliability) come from only 20% of the elements you see on those complicated frameworks. #maintenance #reliability #planningandscheduling

It's not rocket science. Maintenance Planning & Scheduling doesn't have to be all that difficult. But many organisations still struggle to get long-term results from it. Here are just a few of the most common mistakes organisations make that keep them from succeeding. #maintenance #reliability #planningandscheduling #ReliabilityAcademy

"Why should we bother with scheduling?” "Is planning the job not enough?” “How is scheduling going to increase our productivity?” Plenty of my clients and students have asked me these questions. So, here’s the bitter truth: Even if you had world-class planning... It won’t be enough to achieve high productivity. Because planning alone will only help you do individual jobs better. But if you want to get a lot more work done, you will need to implement scheduling as well. In fact... Experience and various benchmarking studies have shown that planning without scheduling has almost no sustained impact on overall productivity. One way to explain this is by using Parkinson’s Law— "The amount of work assigned will expand to the time available." If you need to complete two tasks today, you will get those done and then you’ll figure out what to work on next. And often what happens, you end up using all the available time to complete those 2 tasks, even if they can be finished in half a day. It’s just human nature. And it’s highly inefficient. But if you’re well prepared and have scheduled six things to do for the day, the pressure is on and most likely you’ll get those six things done. And that is what scheduling is all about. Scheduling is essentially goal-setting for your maintenance crew. It's about giving your maintenance crew a clear list of things to do that week and making sure that they have the resources to complete that list of work. You don't want your maintenance crew to wake up in the morning, walk into work, and figure out what to do for the day. Of course, that is just one reason scheduling increases productivity, others include: better coordination of work between trades, or the grouping of similar work, or work on the same equipment location etc. #planningandscheduling #ReliabilityAcademy #maintenance

When I was starting out... I used to believe that the complex pyramids and frameworks posted all over our organisation were necessary for us to function well... “This framework looks so complicated... I’ll just follow the steps and trust that things will work out.” “I’m sure plenty of thinking has gone into these frameworks, so they’re probably effective, right?” I’ve had these thoughts back when I was still new in the maintenance world. But I later realised... that wasn’t always the case. In reality... when you’re too busy coping with an excessive backlog... and you’re too stressed jumping from one emergency to the next... You don’t really have the luxury to implement all these complicated frameworks. No. In fact, these types of frameworks become more of a burden because they distract us from the things that urgently need our attention. If that’s the case... How can you escape reactive maintenance when you’re too busy to do anything about it? You see, there’s a way to simplify these frameworks so we implement ONLY the essentials that bring most of the results. A way to maximise the little resources we have when we struggle in reactive maintenance. And it’s proven to work even in the most reactive environments. It’s called the Road to Reliability framework. It’s unique in its simplicity and effectiveness. I’ve distilled everything I learned in 20+ years into this framework to make sure that my students and clients realise that... Reliability doesn’t have to be complicated. #reliability #maintenance #ReliabilityAcademy

Not all equipment failures are created equal. Some clearly matter more than others. There are failures that cost us millions of dollars… or even the lives of people. Other failures, you wouldn't care too much about. And since we are working with very limited resources… we need to allocate them to failures that DO matter. That's why… Good maintenance programs does NOT try to prevent all failures. Good maintenance programs are risk based. They consider both the consequence and likelihood of failure… and assess where to use our scarce resources to get the greatest benefit. In fact, they are even prepared to deal with the consequences of accepting a certain level of failure. In some cases, the impact of failure is so low, you must also consider the consequences of not doing anything. Because it might be more economical to let the failure run its course instead of doing the PM task. Failure is an option. Sadly, many organisations are doing too many PMs. As John Moubray pointed out in his book “Reliability Centered Maintenance”, typically between 40% – 60% of the PM tasks in a preventive maintenance program add little value. What's worse is, we spend all that effort and resources on maintenance, yet still experience unacceptable failures. So, focus your scarce resources on failures that matter and let some failures just happen. #maintenance #reliability #ReliabilityAcademy

Is defect elimination the same as root cause analysis? We often hear people say, “But we already do root cause analysis (RCA), why do we need defect elimination? Isn’t that just more of the same?” Root cause analysis is all about preventing problems from reoccurring. In that respect, it is the same as defect elimination. But in practice, RCA is about getting rid of the 20% of issues that cause 80% of your breakdowns, downtime, corrective maintenance, and repair costs. When you encounter a significant breakdown, you analyse the failure, determine the root cause and resolve it. You fix it once and for all. Rinse and repeat. So in practice root cause analysis is all about removing the big-ticket items. It is all about dealing with your Bad Actors. But, you also need a process for eliminating the smaller, niggly little things. Because in just about every plant around the world, the little issues add up to a lot. This is where defect elimination comes in. Defect elimination aims to empower your frontline and the wider support teams to independently tackle the many small issues that cause failures. The beauty of defect elimination—when it’s done well—is that it drives you towards a reliability culture in several ways. It removes defects and makes your plant more reliable. But it is also the vehicle to engage a large part of your organisation in reliability. #defectelimination #ReliabilityAcademy