Okay, this may be, we're PM-ing this conveyor system, and it's supposed to be a four-hour PM, and production says, "Hey, we only have two hours. We really need to get back up and running. We ran poorly the last five days. What can you do?"

And maintenance does, they lubricate half of it. They don't pay attention to any belts or chains that are on it, and they just button it back up. Then they check the PM as complete because it's a monthly PM. "We'll just get to it next month."

Well, what that does is that goes into your CMMS, and you'll see that the PM is completed. You'll look back at the last five years and think, "We're doing all the PMs, but yet we're having all this unplanned downtime." Well, you've made this shortcut and given yourself some bad information.

So that's what I see when I go out on the shop floor, that those PMs are just short-cutted.

Another shortcut is root cause investigations. I'm remembering this one plant out in Washington State. They wanted me to observe a job, and it was this big bucket elevator. It was carrying material from the basement floor up three stories.

This bucket elevator was their number one drain of manpower. But when I went out there and observed it, I was talking to the mechanic doing the job. He couldn't lubricate the backside bearings because he needed to lock and tag that, and that took more time.

So management said, "Get the bucket elevator back together as fast as you can," and they weren't lubricating it. And so it failed. This failed every quarter, and it was about three days of unplanned downtime.

So just a shortcut of root-causing: Why? Why can't you go to the backside? They couldn't do it for safety reasons. But what other solutions could they have?

The mechanic told me, "Just put in an extended grease line that they can lubricate while the equipment's running from the front side.

So it was simple things, but the process is speaking to you, and what I see as the shortcut is people don't listen to the mechanics, they don't listen to the technicians, and they're not watching the process. No question, that to me is the biggest shortcut I see.

Yes, I do see, it's always production pressure. It's always production pressure.
"Hey, can we get that gearbox that failed? Can we replace it and get it back in service? I know it takes eight hours. Can you get it to us in four?" And, well, we don't quite balance it. Okay, we don't balance it right, and then we all feel good. Then, four months later it fails again, and maybe more catastrophically. So not doing precision maintenance—that's very common to see.

But I'm telling you, observation will change how you do maintenance. It'll totally change how you do maintenance if you do that step. And it's always skipped.

AT: Okay, well, let's talk about why these shortcuts happen. You pointed to production pressure. Is it always a result of time pressure and production demands? Are there times you can point to something deeper, like staffing issues, inadequate planning, or a weak maintenance culture?

JK: Yeah, great question. Great follow-up. I'm telling you, when you were talking, I wanted to say it's always time pressure. I did earlier. It's always time pressure. It's always production.

But if you ask why one more time, it's a weak culture. It's the belief that, ‘Hey, maintenance is a necessary evil. You guys don't work efficiently. Just get it back to me as fast as possible. Yeah, we ran bad for the last five days with production issues, but that eight-hour maintenance outage—man, if we can cut that to two or skip it altogether, we get a boost because of our own performance.’

So maintenance is about maintaining the performance of the asset, and people forget that. They call it maintenance. Maintain performance. Maintain the quality standard.

I really think that weak culture is at the bottom of all this.

Now, you know that I kind of pointed to weak culture there as blaming operations for not trusting maintenance, but there are two sides to that coin. Maintenance—if you want to aggravate a production manager, schedule an eight-hour outage when they're behind schedule. They need every coil, every part, every widget they can possibly get.

You schedule a maintenance outage from seven to three, and have your crew show up at 8:30. Then have your crew take a 90-minute lunch break. Have your crew quit early. Have them stop working on the job at 2 o'clock. Have your crew driving around looking for parts. So the production manager gives you this precious, precious time, and you don't treat it like an Indianapolis 500 pit stop. So there's two sides to that coin.

Maintenance, you've got to be efficient. You've got a critical outage. That means you practice. You tell everybody what work we're going to do and in what order. You pre-stage the parts. You check out the parts. You make sure that you have any equipment available.

And when that equipment is given to you at 7 o'clock, you have people out there—let's say 7:15, right after a toolbox talk. But at 7:15, they're not looking for parts. They're not looking for the gearbox. They're not looking for the chain. It's staged, checked out. All the parts are there.

So it's really cultural. Once you buy into, "Hey, this eight-hour outage is going to be efficient, and it's going to maintain our operations, maintain the performance of the asset," then you've got a bond of trust.

I would say trust is what you've got to establish. Operations need to trust that maintenance is going to do an efficient job, and maintenance needs to trust that production is going to give them the work and give them the time to do the job.

Once that trust is established, I didn't have a problem with shortcuts.

AT: Yeah, that's a powerful point about culture. And we have talked a lot about that tension between maintenance and operations.

When you're talking about these shortcuts, once one shortcut gets accepted, then it becomes the new standard. And that really, I think, is a management issue too, in terms of building and sustaining that culture.

But you pointed to one quick example earlier, and I'm wondering if you have any other seemingly small shortcuts that can really turn into a major reliability or safety issue down the line. Sometimes those stories really stick with people.

JK: Yeah, this may not be a perfect fit to that question, but it's what comes to mind.
Okay, we were having problems getting all the work done at a power plant I worked at. One of the things they took away from the maintenance people was lubrication of equipment. So they said, "Hey, any bozo with minimal training can go out and top off oil levels, grease fittings, and look at sight glasses. This is so easy to do."

We're going to give that—and I call this a shortcut because it's a shortcut to getting more work done. And we don't train the operations people on how critical lubrication is. It's actually a precision activity.

Okay, so we did that. Well, I inherited that. That's the job I went into. I was the plant manager at this coal-fired power plant. We had a combustion air fan that fed the boiler, and it failed. It failed on a hot day, and the generating unit went down. It cost us a million dollars in energy that we had to purchase. That one event cost a million dollars.

When we dug into it, I went out on the shop floor and talked to operators. I asked, "Are you inspecting this?"

And they go, "Yeah. You know, when we come into work, sometimes there are some safety issues to deal with. Sometimes there are some generation issues. There are some housekeeping issues. And at the end of the day, if we have time, we go and do this oil inspection of the sight glasses and top things off."

Then, I would go to the next operator, and they'd say, "You know, I think Joe does that. You know, it's not me." And they're supposed to be doing it every shift.

But what happens? It's such an easy thing to say, "Hey, we can get more manpower. We'll just have production do some of these easy maintenance tasks." Well, one of the questions you need to ask yourself is, when that production person comes in, where is lubrication on their priority list that shift? Is it number one? Number two? It's typically 10 to 15.

And so then it stops being done, and then you have failures. That was a million-dollar lesson for me.

We created lubrication techs and made it their number one goal. Number one goal. We sent them to training, so the lubrication got done every shift with precision—the right amount. They didn't just put in the oil that was on their buggy or that was convenient. They worried about contamination. They worried about water problems. That one was a powerful lesson for me.

And I put it under the shortcut heading. Some people may say that's not a shortcut. Yes, this was a shortcut. It was saying, "How do we go from having 20 mechanics to 25? Hey, let's just have some production people do it in their free time."

Okay, so man, a million dollars will stick with you for a long time, Anna.

AT: Yeah, that's a lot of money. And it's easy for management to say, "Don't take shortcuts," but, you know, it's much harder to build the staffing and the planning and the expectations that actually make that possible.

So, in that vein, last question from me. Most people listening have probably taken a shortcut one time or another on the plant floor. So how do plant leaders create an environment where people don't feel forced into making those trade-offs? What systems, behaviors, what expectations can help maintenance teams do the job right the first time?

JK: Well, what management needs to do is support their craftspeople. Whenever a craftsperson says, "Hey, you know, I've got a four-hour PM," and then they discover two hours in, "This is going to take six hours because I found four problems. So do you want to shut it down, give me the extra time, or do you want to duct tape it back together?"

Well, if management says, "Duct tape it back together and just get it running, and we'll go after it later," that turns into the culture. Just patch it and go on. Patch it and go on. Patch it and go on.

And management, if they change and say—you know, I'm not saying it's always the right decision to take the additional downtime. Maybe you patch it and then you get it four days later. But a culture of fixing things with precision needs to be your goal, not patch, patch, patch, patch. The culture sees that. The culture sees that.

And if they say, "Hey, management, all they care about is getting this back together," and they actually reward me. I've heard this so many times. You've got a four-hour PM, and they get it done in two. Management says, "Great job. You got it done in two."

Well, how did you get it done in two? Did you do the full PM? Did you do it with precision? Management has got to go and see. "Hey, let's go out and see how you did that." And maybe then the standard needs to change to two hours.

Most often, they rushed the job. They didn't do it with precision.
So management needs to set the expectation that we're doing precision work, and we're going to follow up and audit.

That's not trying to play gotcha. That's just showing how important it is. That PM that you're doing is important.

It's important enough for me to come out of my office, to not go to that meeting, to go out and talk to the mechanic that did the job and say, "Yes, thank you. You did that with precision. How was balancing that shaft? How long did it take you to do it?" They'll talk for 20 minutes about how easy it was or how difficult it was to balance that. And when you have that conversation, they know that that's important.

Okay, so I'm telling you, shortcuts—they're all about management. The management expectation. Management sets the tone. Management sets the culture.

And that starts with getting out of your office, going and seeing, talking to the mechanic.

You can change the culture real fast. People get intimidated by the word culture. "Change the culture. Change the culture."

How do you change the culture? One experience at a time. Create one event for one mechanic. Create another event for an electrician tomorrow. Six months from now, you've changed the culture.

AT: Yeah, we talk a lot about the importance of culture—probably every episode, I think.

But this was also, I think, a great discussion about that tension between production speed and maintenance discipline, and where they can butt heads. The quickest fix isn't always going to be your fastest path to reliability. Are you optimizing for today's production numbers, or are you trying to optimize for that long-term reliability? Those aren't always the same thing, as you pointed out.

JK: One thing I will add is this is why I preach it's critical for operations to own reliability.

You know, you'll stop the blame game when maintenance is responsible for efficient maintenance, and production is responsible for the reliability of the equipment. That is a big step in the right direction to establishing trust and establishing ownership.

AT: Yep, we have a great episode about that from way back. Go check it out. You can find it in our library.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.

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