1. Skip the observation and start with the KPI

One of the biggest mistakes maintenance organizations make, Kuhn says, happens when they decide what needs to be fixed without first observing what is happening on the plant floor. A team sees poor KPIs and immediately decides it needs to improve planning and scheduling, failure tracking or another familiar metric, but the numbers don't necessarily tell the whole story.

“They just have these opinions, and they don't go to the shop floor and do intense observation to know what to work on,” Kuhn says.
Instead, maintenance leaders should spend time observing equipment, people and processes to understand where work is being lost.

The plant floor often makes the problem obvious. A mechanic may be repeatedly improvising around a design problem. A technician may be unable to complete a PM because of an access or safety issue. A process may routinely force maintenance to choose between doing the work correctly and getting equipment back into production.

Without observation, those problems can remain hidden behind the KPIs.

2. Cut a PM short and call it complete

Production pressure is one of the most common drivers of maintenance shortcuts. Kuhn describes a hypothetical four-hour PM on a conveyor system. Production needs the equipment back after two hours, so maintenance lubricates only part of the system, skips inspections of belts and chains, and puts the equipment back into service. Then, the PM is marked complete in the CMMS, which creates a dangerous form of bad data.

Looking back over five years, a manager could see that the monthly PM was completed every month. Yet the equipment continues to experience unplanned downtime. 

The record says the PM happened, but the reality is that only half the work happened. “Well, you've made this shortcut and given yourself some bad information,” Kuhn says.

Maintenance metrics can create a false sense of program effectiveness. A high PM-compliance number doesn't necessarily mean the intended maintenance was performed, unless that work is routinely audited.

3. Patch the failure instead of fixing the cause

Another common shortcut is treating recurring failures as only repair jobs rather than problems to solve.

Kuhn recalls observing maintenance work on a bucket elevator that repeatedly failed and consumed significant maintenance manpower. He talked to the mechanic who told him that he couldn't lubricate bearings on the backside of the equipment without locking and tagging it, which took additional time. Production wanted the elevator returned to service quickly, so the lubrication was often skipped.

“This failed every quarter, and it was about three days of unplanned downtime,” Kuhn says.

The eventual solution wasn't complicated. The mechanic suggested installing an extended grease line so the bearing could be lubricated from the accessible side.

“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,” Kuhn says.

4. Trade precision maintenance for speed

Production pressure can be a constant drain on doing precision maintenance work. 

“It's always time pressure. It's always production. But if you ask why one more time, it's a weak culture,” Kuhn says.

For example, where production asks maintenance to cut an eight-hour gearbox repair down to four hours. The team gets the equipment running but skips or rushes precision activities such as balancing.

Everyone gets what they want in the moment: Production gets its equipment back and maintenance gets the job finished. Four months later, the gearbox fails again. The shortcut simply moved the downtime into the future—and potentially made the eventual failure more severe.

“Maintenance is about maintaining the performance of the asset, and people forget that. They call it maintenance. Maintain performance. Maintain the quality standard,” Kuhn says.

Precision maintenance requires time and discipline. When those requirements are routinely sacrificed to hit today's production target, the organization effectively chooses short-term equipment availability over long-term asset performance.

5. Assign lubrication without assigning ownership

At a power plant where Joe worked, lubrication responsibilities had been moved from maintenance to operations. They were having trouble getting all the work done, and the logic was: Operators could top off oil, grease fittings and check sight glasses, freeing maintenance personnel for other work. But nobody trained the operators on lubrication precision.

“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,” Kuhn says.

It became something operators were expected to do when they had time, and often they didn't. In practice, lubrication was competing with safety issues, generation problems, housekeeping and other operational priorities.
"Where is lubrication on their priority list that shift?" Kuhn asks. "Is it number one? Number two? It's typically 10 to 15."

The plant eventually created dedicated lubrication technicians, gave lubrication a clear ownership model and trained those technicians to perform the work correctly, including concerns such as lubricant quantity, contamination and water intrusion.

Assigning a maintenance task to another group doesn't eliminate the need for ownership, training and standards.

6. Reward people for finishing early

The culture can start to support shortcuts when management rewards them. Suppose a PM is expected to take four hours, and a technician completes it in two. Management congratulates the technician for getting the equipment back quickly. But does anybody ask why the job took half the expected time?
Was the PM redesigned and legitimately optimized? Or did the technician skip inspections, lubrication points or other required work?

“What management needs to do is support their craftspeople. Whenever a craftsperson says, ‘Hey, 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,” Kuhn says.
If the organization rewards speed without verifying quality, employees quickly learn what management truly values.

“Management needs to set the expectation that we're doing precision work, and we're going to follow up and audit,” Kuhn says.

7. Waste the maintenance window you fought to get

Kuhn puts some responsibility squarely on maintenance, too. The relationship between operations and maintenance can be fraught, but most problems can be overcome with a certain amount of respect for each department. For example, if operations gives maintenance an eight-hour outage, maintenance has to use that time efficiently.

“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,” Kuhn says.

A maintenance crew that spends the first hour looking for a gearbox undermines its own argument for needing more downtime.

Kuhn compares a critical outage to an Indianapolis 500 pit stop: The team should know what it is going to do before the window opens.

That efficiency is important for more than productivity. It establishes trust. 

Reliability culture is built one maintenance decision at a time

It's tempting to treat reliability culture as something abstract that requires a major organizational transformation. Kuhn sees it differently.

“Shortcuts—they're all about management. The management expectation. Management sets the tone. Management sets the culture,” Kuhn says.
Management establishes culture one decision at a time.

“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,” Kuhn says.