Podcast: Overcoming common blind spots in preventive maintenance programs

Key takeaways

• Lack of coordination in planned work is a major cause of wasted time and downtime.
• Wrench time losses steam from flawed systems, not technician performance.
• Operations must share ownership of reliability to achieve lasting plant success.

Joe Kuhn, CMRP, former plant manager, engineer, and global reliability consultant, is now president of Lean Driven Reliability LLC. He is the author of the book “Zero to Hero: How to Jumpstart Your Reliability Journey Given Today’s Business Challenges” and the creator of the Joe Kuhn YouTube Channel, which offers content on starting your reliability journey and achieving financial independence. In our monthly podcast miniseries, Ask a Plant Manager, Joe considers a commonplace scenario facing the industry and offers his advice, as well as actions that you can take to get on track tomorrow. In this episode, Joe discusses the importance of planned work coordination.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

PS: You bet. Okay, so one piece of advice that we get from you often is what you call, go and see, so go out on the plant four and actually do observation and see what's actually happening out there in your observations. And you assure everyone that you'll be amazed at what you find. So, in your experience, when you're out there, watching planned maintenance take place, watching the techs work, what are some of the most common blind spots that you see when it comes to PM programs at plants, and what do you think can be done about it?

JK: Yeah, great question. And so many experiences pop in my head when I get asked that question. One of the biggest things you'll see is a lack of coordination. And when I say that it's a lack of coordination, you have two maintenance techs trying to install a pump. They don't know where the pump is. They don't know where the packing material is. The equipment's still running, and operations needs it for another hour. The electrician didn't disconnect it yet, and they're not supposed to for two hours. And you're thinking, I thought this was a planned job. So lack of coordination is huge. And when you go and see it, it's actually so easy to fix. It doesn't cost any money. It's telling everybody, ‘Hey, this is a planned job. It's going to start at nine o'clock,’ and everybody needs to nod their head and say, ‘Hey, we're going to be prepared at nine o'clock.’

Here's a flash point for a lot of people, when I mentioned the term wrench time. Wrench time is the effective time of the mechanic or electrician. How often, how many minutes or hours during the day are they actually doing productive work, versus waiting for instruction, versus waiting for parts, trying to find parts, all that kind of stuff that gets in the way. Wrench time is, I found it never, and I'm using that term deliberately, never to be the problem of the employee doing the work. It's always the system that they're working in. If you go in with that mindset, you'll see all kinds of opportunity like this coordination one. Why can't we coordinate electrical with mechanical? Why can't we coordinate this outage with production? There's no good excuse for doing that. If you can't do it today, put it off to this afternoon, put it off the next shift, put it off the next week. But that coordination ends up driving down wrench time significantly, and it's a free thing to fix. You really don't have a good excuse for not coordinating well. You don't have a good excuse for that.

I like to give the analogy of the Indianapolis 500 when a car comes into the pit crew. The five guys that are changing the tires, putting in gas and adjusting this and that they don't just decide what to do when the car comes in. They all have it scripted out how they're going to do the work. So here’s a challenge for you: on one job next week, one job, let's do perfect coordination, just one next week, and let's all agree what that job is and how we can do it perfectly to create an experience for us all.

So coordination is number one, and I alluded to this already, but parts. You tell somebody to change out a pump, and it's guess or find where the part is, find where the coupling, if you need to put a new coupling on, go find it. Go find the key stock. Go find some packing material. Go find some shim stock, and you're thinking, ‘Oh my gosh. These guys are just on a hide and seek mission.’ So coordination of parts, one of the things you can do for that is you put in place a job kitter. You have every part for that job on a skid, verified by the planner. 100% of the parts, not just the pump, the coupling, the key stock, the shims, the packing, anything you need for that job, it is there.

Also, another thing you'll find is, and I’ve got to think of the right way to say this, because it was embarrassing, but the biggest waste that I've seen is too many people assigned to the job. There'll be a two person job, and there'll be three there, there'll be four. And I'm asking, ‘Well, why do you have three there?’ Well, you know, four years ago, when we did this job, it ended up being a bigger job than that than we thought. So we needed a third person there. So from four years ago to the end of time, we're just going to add an extra person to that job. Oh, and by the way, if it goes normally, it takes two hours, but it can go wrong, and we're measured by schedule efficiency. So it takes two hours for two people. So I'm going to schedule three people for four. That is extremely common, and look how easy that is to fix. Don't plan for the worst case. Plan for what you think it should take. Two people, two hours. If they get into the job and it looks like it's going to take longer, raise your hand. Ask the supervisor. This is going to take a little bit longer. Do you want to add resources? Do we want to tell production it's going to take longer. Planning for worst case manpower and duration of the PM or the rebuild is a cancer in organizations.

If 99 times out of 100 the job takes two hours, why are you planning it for four? Again, extremely simple fix. That's what I love about observation. Observation not only tells you where your waste is, but it identifies extremely simple, low cost and fast solutions that you can put in place on Monday.

The last thing I'll say that was shocking during observation and very common is incomplete work. So you, as a manager, you have a PM on a conveyor belt, and there are 12 steps to it. Rarely did I find all 12 steps being executed. For some reason, they only got 10 done. They got six done. They got pulled off the job. The planned work was supposed to take two hours. They pulled them off for an hour in the middle because the equipment was down over here that they told production they'd have the equipment back at 10 o'clock. So they only do six of the 12 tasks, turn it back in. Lo and behold, the equipment fails next week, next month, and then people may even decide to buy a new conveyor, because this conveyor is just not lasting like it should be. And all you see inside your CMMS is that all the PMs were conducted with precision and on time and they were complete. And the reality is very few of them are completed in their entirety.

And again, easy fix, easy fix. Okay, so those are some of the more common things I've seen when going out and seeing and it's shocking, so much so Anna, when I would organize one of these events with the leadership team to let's see reality, what's going on in our plant. I would have to upfront, ask for their commitment that we're going to go out and do an observation for eight hours tomorrow. Upfront, I asked them to commit to not saying today is the worst day I've ever seen at our plant. And then guess what? The next day you're not allowed to say, this is the second worst day I've ever seen at our plant, because that's what always happened. They always said, I've never seen it this bad. This can't be normal. The problem is they're not taking the time to see the waste. They're not seeing the waste. And I listed, there are some of the common ones.