Home > Articles > Boiler Room

Voices: Boiler Room

The power of reliability excellence

In striving to achieve improvements, many organizations turn to lean manufacturing, six sigma and total productive maintenance (TPM). They’re valid initiatives and proper implementation depends on having stable, repeatable operations. Realize that such operational stability is delivered through a combination of organizational and equipment reliability.

PlantServices.com
By R. Keith Mobley, CMRP, MBB

Sustainable business improvements come through organizational ownership of standardized work processes coupled with the discipline to execute them. In striving to achieve improvements, many organizations turn to lean manufacturing, six sigma and total productive maintenance (TPM). They’re valid initiatives and proper implementation depends on having stable, repeatable operations. Realize that such operational stability is delivered through a combination of organizational and equipment reliability.

Core methods: Address each facet of reliability excellence to achieve reliability, low cost and profitability. If one element is sub-par, it jeopardizes the stability of anything that follows. Reliability requires systematic identification and elimination of waste from processes while increasing responsiveness to change. The 10 interrelated, perhaps concurrent, core methods that an organization can use to implement a lean production system are, in sequential order:

• Six sigma
• Hoshin kanri
• Kaizen
• Five S (5-S)
• Cellular manufacturing
• Just-in-time (JIT) production
• Kanban
• Seven wastes (7-W)
• Single minute exchange of dies (SMED)
• Total productive maintenance (TPM)

The differences: The primary difference between reliability excellence, lean, six sigma, TPM and other improvement processes is the implementation logic and methods. Most applications of these processes are limited to a narrow focus on horizontal, tactical silos intended to address a single limiting factor within the plant or corporation. As a result, applying these processes might generate improvements in the focus area, but because it isn’t applied widely enough, it too often increases cost of goods sold and reduces product throughput.

Six sigma is almost exclusively implemented as a quality assurance tool or to gain ISO certification. In neither case do the implementations consider organizational change management, or the effect this type of implementation will have on other critical issues, such as cost of goods sold, life-cycle cost, asset reliability and even environmental, health and safety.

Few, if any, companies fully implement the entire lean manufacturing process. Instead, selected components, such as five-S or seven wastes, are implemented as quick-fix tools in one or more areas of production. While these are good and needed methodologies, they won’t provide the benefit that most plants need for survival.

Again, the critical limitations of a narrow-focus application of select parts of the lean manufacturing process are change management and universal application of lean as a cohesive process.

Integrate processes such as lean, six sigma, and total productive maintenance into a single holistic process implemented vertically and horizontally throughout the plant or plants. For example, 5-S and 7-W lean methodologies are applied in each functional area of the plant, not just the production function. The foundation of change must be a thorough understanding of the limiting factors that restrict performance. Reliability excellence includes an assessment process that accurately identifies, quantifies and prioritizes the factors that must be corrected to achieve and sustain desired performance levels.

Organizational change management (hoshin kanri) is the primary driver of the process.

Without changing the work culture and the way that each employee performs duties and makes business decisions, the tools provided by these processes will have little, if any, sustainable benefit. Management commitment and effective leadership are nurtured and developed through the business reengineering training and development process that starts at the beginning of the transformation and continues throughout implementation.

Total employee involvement is encouraged throughout transformation. Evaluation of existing work processes, development of new, more effective processes and the training for and implementation of these processes is done through cross-functional focus teams comprised of stakeholders within the organization. The entire reliability excellence transformation is by the workforce, for the workforce.

While the objectives and methods of lean are valid and desirable, the methods employed don’t address two critical success factors. First, the sole focus is on the production organization and excludes that asset reliability, as well as an effective maintenance function, are critical to lean. Second, lean assumes that the processes used in day-to-day business (planning, management, operations, procurement and maintenance) are reliable. Reliability excellence draws heavily on lean and six sigma methodologies, but also includes the missing pieces needed to achieve a sustainable level of improvement and build the foundation for continuous improvement that solidifies the company’s chance for long-term survival.

E-mail Contributing Editor R. Keith Mobley, CMRP, MBB, principal consultant at Life Cycle Engineering, at kmobley@lce.com.

More Voices

The power of reliability excellence
11/05/2007
In striving to achieve improvements, many organizations turn to lean manufacturing, six sigma and total productive maintenance (TPM). They’re valid initiatives and proper implementation depends on having stable, repeatable operations. Realize that such operational stability is delivered through a combination of organizational and equipment reliability.

Illuminating maintenance: Keep your KPI dashboard front and center
10/03/2007
Plant managers need a KPI dashboard to show them, in clear terms, the current status of every system under their control.

A case for continued change - develop a detailed program
09/12/2007
Educating the workforce, from the CEO to the newest plant-floor employee, is critical to change. Regardless of source, education must be followed with comprehensive training that exposes the organization’s critical core to available possibilities. Such training begins the culture change process and produces a core group that can continue the transformation.

Four short steps to maintenance excellence
08/06/2007
In a production environment, you want the lines to meet quality goals and standards with just enough maintenance to sustain reliability. In any environment, an asset must provide that reliability and, thus, must be maintained. There are four basic requirements you must have to be successful in proactively maintaining assets.

You can minimize the risks of the asset management gamble
07/02/2007
True asset management isn’t a system you can buy. Instead, it’s a business discipline that is enabled by the people, processes, data and technology involved. If you want an optimum outcome, apply risk management during the project’s entire duration.

The power quad: A plant manager can do four things that maximize reliability
06/04/2007
Many plant managers aren’t aware of the four ways they can help optimize asset reliability to reduce cost, maximize asset utilization and increase plant capacity. It’s about time they became engaged in the reliability process.

Learn this maintenance mantra: You don't know what you don't know
05/17/2007
There seems to be a universal sense of denial amongst decision-makers, says Keith Mobley in this month's Boiler Room. Find out how to admit what you don't know, and how to improve your plant in the process.

Regulations and reliability are the easy parts of risk management
01/18/2007
Companies invest substantial amounts of money and time in developing risk management plans that are designed primarily as reactive response procedures for events that happen and little in plans or actions specifically designed to prevent the disasters.

Keep the government away
12/17/2006
Use reliability to protect you from being caught off-guard by environmental incidents.

Put a plant-wide focus on functional failures
10/05/2006
Short-term and long-term solutions can increase reliability, asset availability, utilization, quality and capacity, but they’re not easy or simple. Look at the barriers that hold a plant back.

The future of reliability
08/07/2006
The dilemma that American companies face and will continue to face during the next five to 10 years is having a poorly educated, unmotivated workforce when something else is needed to operate and maintain ever more complex production and information management systems.

Beyond FMEA
07/24/2006
It seems that preventive maintenance (PM) is now a misguided and misused term, says Ricky Smith in this month's Boiler Room. A little deeper thinking can lead to more effective preventive maintenance.

Effective change management
06/19/2006
Change management should involve questioning those closest to the situation to determine the best plan for solving the problem. Then all management has to do is implement the recommendations. Is it really this simple?

Coating concepts
06/07/2006
Engineered coatings provide new levels of maintenance efficiency, energy savings and safety. Advances in materials science are opening new doors for industrial coatings, says Sheila Kennedy in her monthly Technology Toolbox column.

Reliability is worth a second look
05/17/2006
Statistical analysis and time-based preventive maintenance don’t really address the ability to perform. It's time to get familiar with the definition of reliability.

Leading change
04/17/2006
Leaders need to create and sustain continuous path without upsetting his employees. Learn how to clear a solid path and have the workforce follow you to great heights.

Creating a culture change in your maintenance department
03/29/2006
Is your maintenance crew in a reactive mindset? Check out a list of qualifiers to find out and then learn how to change it.

Tactical versus strategic measures
02/21/2006
Regular columnist and contributing editor Keith Mobley, CMRP, says that a best practices plan for maintenance must contain a tactical component, but not ignore a strategic one.