Interview with John Day - Alumax, Mt Holly - Association for Maintenance Professionals

You would not believe how many organizations have disfunctional or no Maintenance Planning and Scheduling? This is crazy, without an effective planning and scheduling function you cannot expect wrench time to be above 20%, rework is high and MTBF is low.

How does your organization plan and schedule maintenance work?

We want planning and scheduling to be focused on the early identification of Potential Failures, Lubrication, time based overhauls (we need to talk about this subject another day).

If you want to know if you have a proactive planner, call them on the phone and tell them you need a part right now for a breakdown and if you get the dial tone you have a proactive planner because you must have dialed the wrong number. NEVER drag a maintenance planner into the reactivity of an organization. Allow them to be proactive even if no one else is, trust me.

I know this may shock many of you but most companies PM programs are not tied to specific Failure Modes, even their Lubrication Programs are not. I know most of you find this shocking but how does this happen when we know Preventive Maintenance is to Prevent Failure or Identify a Potential Failure.

Failure Modes is what we are looking to prevent or identify early enough so we can plan and schedule the work. The only change to this are PMs tied to regulatory requirements.

I use this analogy "if you are performing PM on equipment that continues to fail you have a problem" (unless your maintenance strategy is Run to Failure).

Have you noticed this to be an issue?

My belief is Maintenance Supervisors are the key to effective maintenance work execution and thus hold the key to optimizing equipment reliability.

If you agree, how do we make this happen? How do you engage maintenance supervisors to motivate their maintenance team to be efficient and effective?

Effective work procedures have been at the source of many major failures through out history in the Oil and Gas Industry. I think the problem is two fold, one, if we have a effective procedure does anyone follow it? second, if we don't have a repeatable procedure why not?

What are your thoughts? Tell me what you think.

PM Compliance tells us if a PM has been completed within some time period however it does not tell us if the PM is effective or now. I live PM Labor Hrs vs EMER Labor hours.



What are your thoughts?

I conducted a survey of over 300 facilities worldwide and found only 2 % were performing to best practices in Maintenance Planning and about the same Scheduling Maintenance. I think it is important to define best practice for planning and make a process which is focused and disciplined, no calling the planner to expedite parts. In my opinion, I believe scheduling has to evolve from scheduling by week to by day. It is difficult and that is why I always suggest planning and scheduling training for everyone from the plant manager (2 hours) to the Maintenance craft personnel (4 hours). The problem is not just planning and scheduling because it begins at how you identify work and hopefully most of your work comes from PM or PdM and not breakdowns.

How does your organization operate planning and scheduling? I have seen some companies using unique ways to plan and schedule that are awesome and others that need to go away.

Many organizations today are focusing their resources on the most dominant failure pattern in their operation instead of reacting to problems. Identify the most dominant failure pattern allows a company to focus on the common thread which has the largest impact on asset integrity.

The US Navy conducted a study of their assets and found the most dominant failure pattern was infant mortality and considered the findings to be unacceptable. They put forth an effort to reduce infant mortality of their assets from over 60% to 6% and were successful in accomplishing it.

Focusing on the dominant failure pattern causes an organization to identify the common thread between different types of assets and impacts asset integrity overall in an effective manner. The failure patterns shown below were conducted back in the 1960s by Nolan and Heap with United Airlines. Many companies have found these failure patterns to be same across most industry verticals.

Do you know your Equipment's Dominant Failure Pattern and if you did would it help you identify the common thread between failures?