And I have found this actually not one of the major obstacles I had to cross, but it's important everybody understands their role. When I say operations owns reliability, the best analogy I use is your car.

You, as the owner of your car, own the reliability of your car. When it starts making noises, when it doesn't work, when it starts to smell funny, when the temperature's running hot, you, as the operator, have the responsibility of taking that into a shop and having that assessed.

The maintenance people, the shop, they look at your auto, they'll diagnose it, and they'll say, ‘Here's what we need to do.’ Okay, so they're providing technical expertise, diagnostics and a solution to you.

You, as the operator, need to say, ‘Hey, let's fix all four of those things. Let's fix two of them. Let's not fix any of them, and let's fix it today. Let's fix it next week.’

Those are operator decisions. If you don't have the operator involved in reliability, you're going to be severely limited on the results you're going to achieve. Severely limited.

So what I found in organizations is maintenance naturally, they're the most skilled people on diagnosing the problem. They know how the equipment would fail. They know an estimate of how long it's going to take to fix something. It's usually not the first time something's failed, right?

So if you rely on maintenance for that expertise and the time that it's going to take, ‘Hey, this is going to take about four hours, maybe five, but it depends on if this gasket needs to be replaced or this key needs to be replaced,’ different things like that, and then you have operations say, ‘We own the decisions around, yes, we are going to do this. Yes, we are going to do it at this time.’

That is a major part of reliability, making that decision. And too often what I've seen, and this is the culture people don't want to give up, is they just throw rocks back and forth.

Operations may say, ‘Hey, we're going to run this thing. It's Wednesday. It's making noise. It's smoking. But we're going to run till the weekend, and then if it breaks down, that's maintenance's fault.’

That is the biggest danger toward a reliability culture I see: us and them.
Each one has a different role. Let people do what they are empowered to do. Operations, they're the ones that give up the equipment. Okay, so let's not act like they don't have some responsibility here. Maintenance, you bring the technical expertise.

I found that it works pretty darn well when people understand who's best to make the decision.

AT: Yeah, I think you've used the terms deciders and advisors before in this discussion, which I love. So the advisors are the maintenance team, and the deciders are the operators who are ultimately going to decide that, and they are really the ones closest to the equipment. Hopefully, they're watching it, and they're going to notice something changing and bring light to that. So their observations can be really valuable. So there is a place for them, I think, in basic care, early detection, but understaffed maintenance teams can't really use them as a substitute as well, or an effective one, either way.

JK: Right.

AT: So, what are some signs that maintenance teams are either holding too tightly to equipment ownership, or conversely, stepping back too much and expecting operators to handle issues that they shouldn't?

JK: Actually, this has not happened to me. I love that: advisors and deciders.
And I have not experienced maintenance walking away and saying, ‘I'll just take my ball and go home. If you're in charge of reliability, I'm leaving, and you just tell me what to do.’ That never happened. I've never seen that, and I've been in 42 plants during my career.

And I don't know if it was just a culture I was in, but my experience is zero on this. It's like maintenance people love when operations gets involved because, hey, they're going to start listening to our advice more instead of, ‘If it's broke, it's your fault.’

Now, if it's broke, what could we have done differently? Should we have—how could we have communicated better? That's where it falls.

So the fear that maintenance is going to withdraw, or maintenance is going to get too involved in wanting to completely own it, I just haven't seen that.

Operations-led really was a big yawn whenever we made that change. It wasn't dramatic at all.

AT: Okay. Do operators have any role in maintenance tasks, in the day to day? In your experience, are there any activities that they can be involved in, whether just basic inspection, cleaning? Is any of that okay, or are organizations really going to try to push too much on operators if you open that door?

JK: Oh, absolutely. Operators are needed to be heavily involved in the reliability and health of their equipment. But I'm telling you, it's a very, very slippery slope.

So often people get excited about, ‘Hey, we don't have enough maintenance people, so let's just give all the operators some basic tasks. Let's train them on how to change out these air filters. Let's train them on lubrication,’ and lubrication seems to always be one.

And I've only been burned, only been burned badly, when operators took on lubrication. The one example I'm thinking about was at a power plant. We asked operators to look at these sight glasses on these big fan motors and gearboxes, and we asked them to look at these and top them off. And it sounded extremely simple. Here's the oil. Here's where you put it in. No problem at all.

But what you got to think about is when you give a task like that to operations, where is it on their daily priority to do?

Okay, they're coming in. The equipment's all ready. We did touch-hand relief. The equipment was already running. So the operations, there may have been some operating issues, some quality issues, some housekeeping issues, some noise issues that were their fault that they were trying to work on.

So they're trying to get through all those things. Maybe engineering has a test they want to run, and so you got all these other competing priorities. Where does lubrication fall?

I'm telling you, it usually falls to number 10 or 11, and then it gets bumped off the list. And six months later, you have a big failure, and then you look and you say, ‘Oh, I thought we stopped doing that.’

And when you give that lubrication task to a craftsman, that's number one for them to do. It gets done. It gets done with precision. The right amount of oil. They'll look, the right amount of oil, the right type of oil. They'll notice any other problems in the area.

So I'm telling you, I lost 100x more money giving some maintenance tasks to operations than I say—let me say 1,000. Let me say 1,000x.

Now, what can operations do? Okay, they know how the equipment is supposed to run. So if they run into, like, I'm making one part bad out of 10 now, so they got some quality issues, or I'm doing some resets, or the machine's not sounding right today.

So establishing a system where the operator of the equipment says, ‘Hey, here are four things wrong with my equipment today,’ or they're doing some housekeeping, and they don't have piles of trash and Oil-Dri or floor dry, a foot deep around the equipment. The equipment looks in good condition, and you can see leaks, you can see nonconformance, whatever that condition may be, scrap, very easily.

That's what operators can do to be the eyes, ears, nose of the craftsman. Say, ‘This isn't right. Something needs to be adjusted. Take a look at it,’ and then operations works with maintenance on the timing of that correction.

Okay, but be extremely careful with giving a maintenance PM-type task to operations. I've only had bad results from that, and you’ve got to supply the training. But what most people miss is the priority. They miss the priority.
And I say if you are insistent on doing that, and I'm not saying don't. I'm saying go in with extreme caution. You have to have an auditing process.

I went to one plant. It was here in the town I live in, and the operators were supposed to lubricate these sewing machines. They had 100 sewing machines, and the operators were supposed to be doing it.

I went around and I asked the operators, and all of them thought that we stopped doing that. 100% of them said we stopped doing that, but management says, ‘Oh yeah, they're doing this every single shift.’

So you've got to have an auditing process. It's a very slippery slope. It is not easy money to pick up. Don't think it's, ‘Hey, I could double my maintenance workforce by just giving more work to operations.’ That's a time bomb.

AT: Yeah, they should definitely keep their eyes and ears open, but they can't be expected to report every little issue. Maintenance still needs to be on top of that, and they shouldn't be waiting around to hear from operators about problems either.

Okay, so this may be reiterating a little bit, but we've established who owns reliability, right? That's operations. So who owns maintenance? Both the work, the decisions about the work, and prioritizing, planning, and scheduling that work—who owns all those different steps?

JK: Like everything, I give a complicated answer. Yeah, essentially, the maintenance—it comes down to the maintenance manager is the ultimate owner of what we do. Now, that doesn't mean they're a tyrant. Okay, they listen to the craftspeople. They listen to their experience. Here's what has happened in the past.

If we, on our monthly PMs, just—what does that need to consist of, how long has it taken, what work do we do during that monthly PM? Listen, listen, listen.
But there are some specifics where the management of maintenance needs to step in and say, ‘This is what we're going to do. I've listened to all the input.’
I'll give an example. Say you're doing an inspection on a hydraulic piece of equipment. Okay, that inspection may take place every month, and it may be two hours inspecting these 10 things. You may decide—management may decide—and say, ‘Hey, wait a second. We're doing oil analysis on the hydraulic system, and we're doing vibration on it, those condition monitoring tools. Okay, so that technician is out there doing that. We are going to stop that monthly PM in favor of this predictive maintenance technology, and maybe we'll do an inspection once every six months, or maybe not at all.’

But management is going to be the person, or the team, that makes that decision. Okay. Now, again, don't be a tyrant. Explain why we're doing that. Explain the technology.

But maintenance—ultimately, the management of the maintenance department makes that decision. Yes, if you have an engineer on your team, they may say, ‘Hey, we can change this PM from monthly to every quarter, based on the last five years' worth of inspections. We think that's perfectly reasonable to do.’

We can change the time, the frequency. We can change the number of people. We can change how much work's done. But those decisions always come from management with an ear towards the craftspeople that are doing the job, because there's risk involved.

Okay, and when I had a massive effort at my last plant to shift to condition monitoring from time-based maintenance, and there was a lot of fear with that. Why don't we do both?

Well, both gets really expensive, so management has to listen, listen, listen. Know the technology, what it's capable of doing, deciding, and you expect to be right 90, 95% of the time, and then learn from that. But it's a transition.

AT: Definitely. So operations owns reliability, but not necessarily every maintenance decision that goes along with that, and in maintenance ownership, I think there's a lot of different levels to that. Who's identifying the problem, who prioritizes it, who decides what repairs are required, who performs the work, and then finally, who is verifying that that equipment is back to its standard.

JK: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

AT: All right, so let's look finally then at plant managers a little bit, and any of them listening today, or anyone who would want to improve collaboration between operations and maintenance starting tomorrow. Where should they begin?

JK: The first thing I would do is, if I was in charge of maintenance—well, if I'm the plant manager, I think that's what you asked. You may have an operations manager and then a maintenance manager underneath you.
Both of those camps need to get their house in order first.

So, for example, from a maintenance standpoint, okay, let's start doing precision work. Okay, if we're going to put it on a belt, we're going to put on a chain, we're going to align a shaft, we're going to do it right. We're going to do it right. We're going to do precision work.

We're not going to fix something and then fix it three more times to finally get it right. So we're going to get our precision right, and then we're going to get our estimates right.

If we say we have an eight-hour PM scheduled for tomorrow, that means we have an eight-hour PM scheduled for tomorrow. That means 7 o'clock to 3 o'clock. We turn the equipment over in a certain condition.

So take responsibility for what you control: precision work and timeline.
Okay, operations, get your house in order. This means if you're going to turn the equipment over to maintenance from seven to three tomorrow, that's not 7:30. That's not quarter till nine. That's not 10. And can you give it back to me at two? Okay, you hold the time, too.

Okay, and also, what condition is the equipment in? This area is cleaned up. The equipment is parked in this location with the head here. Whatever that is, so get your house in order first.

Okay, that—absolutely fix your own house.

Then I would say, okay, now we're going to transfer the ownership of reliability—it rests with operations now. But after both work on their own house, because it's easy in maintenance to say, ‘Oh, our outages. We can't do our outages on time because the equipment's never given to us on time, and they always want it back early.’

Get your house in order first, and if you don't know what is out of order in your house, just ask your counterpart. They'll tell you. They'll tell you what you do wrong.

And maintenance, one more thing I'll add to maintenance: hey, if you have an outage from seven to three tomorrow, that is a precious time that operations is giving you from seven to three. Have your crew show up at 7 o'clock. Have your crew show up 7 o'clock. Have your parts staged out there at 6:30, so you're not—if I give that piece of equipment to you at 7 o'clock and your crew shows up at 8 o'clock, I'm already upset. Okay, that's the deal.

Think of an Indianapolis 500 pit crew. When the car comes in, they don't say, ‘Best guess, we should find where the tires are,’ or, ‘We should find—where's the fuel? When should we get the fuel in? Who does that first?’

No, that's all orchestrated. Okay, get your own house in order first, then transfer ownership second.

AT: Yeah, and I think it's just a little bit about respect, too, as you said, and understanding what the other department goes through.

JK: Yeah.

AT: I don't want anyone to listen to this discussion today and immediately want to try and start reorganizing departments and rewriting job descriptions and launching new initiatives. And I think really the first step is very simple and just sitting down with operations and maintenance and explicitly defining who owns what.

JK: Who owns what? Advisors and deciders. That's what I'd like for people to remember from today. You brought that in.

AT: That's yours, but I do like that one. 
Well, I do think this is a great discussion about accountability and ownership and that sometimes complicated relationship between operations and maintenance when it comes to equipment reliability.
So, Joe, thanks for being here. Thanks for your opinions, as always.

JK: Yeah, it was great. Great, great questions.

AT: Thank you also to our listeners for joining us. You've been listening to Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast. This is 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.

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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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