Podcast: How to spot fake reliability programs and insights on maintenance execution and culture

And I’m saying, that’s not a full-time reliability engineer. So that’s test number one.Test number two: planning meetings. You can really tell a lot about a maintenance organization by going to their planning meetings. What work was completed last week, and what was scheduled? Did they have 20 jobs scheduled and you got five of them completed, or you got 19 of them completed? You can see how unplanned work is intervening in daily life.

The third thing I like to do is observe work being conducted. I don’t care what you tell me in the conference room—I care what’s happening on the shop floor. Am I going around to three work crews and they’re all doing reactive work? Well, maybe you're, in name only, having a reliability culture.

KPIs—I don’t believe KPIs that you tell me in an email or in the conference room. I’ve got to see the KPIs in the work being conducted, like wrench time, precision, things like that.
Number four thing I’m thinking about is problem-solving teams. I’m telling you, if you don’t have problem-solving teams working on your strategic issues—like the same lubrication problems are number one and number two next year, this year, last year—you’re going to be disappointed.

One of my favorite tests—this is number five—this was from somebody else. He called it the “tennis shoe test.” Tennis shoe test, like athletic shoes. At nine o’clock in the morning, you go around to your maintenance planners, your reliability engineers, your technicians, your supervisors—do they still have their tennis shoes on, or do they have their work shoes on?

If they have their work shoes on, they probably went out on the shop floor—seeing reality, engaging with people. If they have their tennis shoes on, good chance they’re managing their reliability program from the office. And if you're doing that, I’m almost 100% sure you have an illusion of a reliability culture.

Also, when I’m out on your shop floor, do I see leadership there? Leadership must be on the shop floor to audit what they expect, whether it's PMs. Are they doing precision work out there? And they also must inspire people by connecting the dots. They go out on the shop floor and mechanics are doing a job—tell them why that job is important and how it connects.

The last thing I’ll say is, I have a test: I go to production and ask them what their involvement is in maintaining the equipment and the reliability program. And unfortunately, most of the time they say, “Why are you talking to me? Go talk to the maintenance guy.”
Well, I immediately know that they’re leaving significant waste on the table when production is not involved. I found, in my experience, about 50% of the unplanned downtime was a result of production-driven issues.

So there are eight things I look for when I’m walking around. Now notice, I didn’t say I read a report, I sat in a conference room, listened to a presentation. I’m going out on the shop floor and going to people’s offices and making observations. That’s what I see. And it’s very, very common—very common.

I would say far less than 10% of the people have a very strong, quality reliability culture in place.

PS: Yeah, I was shocked by that number you threw out. I think you said it in the reverse the first time—that 90% or more of the plants that you had been in had some facet of a fake reliability program. Not that their whole program was necessarily fake, but that was a high number for sure. 

JK: Oh yeah, and it's unfortunate, and I wish I understood it more. Reliability and maintenance best practices have been around 40 years—50 years. We don’t have a knowledge problem; we have an execution problem.

And I think part of that execution is, a lot of reliability programs are designed and set up and implemented to start producing results three, five, six years from now—and you don’t have that long. Management doesn’t have the patience for that.
You can come up with a reliability program that gives you results—tangible, bottom-line results—in a quarter. That’s 90 days. Start getting results in a quarter, then you can have a good, sustainable program over time.

These pie-in-the-sky ideas—“hey, we just got to design perfection, we’ve got to work on our strategic problems, this is going to pay off five years from now”—I give you almost no chance of being successful. It’s never happened in my career.

PS: Like you said, without those immediate results, reliability or maintenance is going to be the first to go when the budget cuts start, if that’s not really backed up.
A lot of good stuff there. A couple of things I want to reiterate. Number one: don’t fool yourself. Really make sure that you’re out there actively doing your program. Like we said, it’s not just something in name only, the organization is going to lose hope in the program as a whole.

And the other thing I loved was the tennis shoe test. I am from the Midwest, and I know what a tennis shoe is. My husband is from the Mid-Atlantic—he’s from Maryland—and the first time I said “tennis shoe” to him, he had no idea what I was talking about. So we’ll also call it the athletic shoe test, but that’s a good one.
Are they in their work shoes? Are they out there on the shop floor? Are they stuck in their tennies—“tennies” is even what we used to say. That’s even more Midwest, right?

All right, well, thanks, Joe. That’ll do it for this episode. Thank you to our listeners. You are listening to Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast. This was a special series presentation with Joe Kuhn called Ask a Plant Manager. I’m Anna Townshend with Plant Services. We’ll see you next question.

 

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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