TLC: the ultimate maintenance methodology

Forget TPM, TQM and RCM. World-class maintenance relies on another three-letter acronym often overlooked in calculations of ideal cycle times, according to experts at the Works Management Maintenance Conference. Show your people some TLC. Train them to fix faults, lead them to seek out root causes and celebrate their successes. The fundamental formula really is that simple, said Bruce Farrar, engineering manager at concrete paving manufacturer, Marshalls in Halifax. "We've got a talented workforce and we pride ourselves on empowering that workforce. We involve people and by involving people we get the results that we need." The importance of empowerment Empowerment equates to more than a management buzzword at Marshalls' Brookfoot Works site. Workers go on the front foot to identify underperforming machines, use Pareto analysis on downtime data and action improvements, with a stakeholder group comprising maintenance coordinator, departmental fitter, maintenance electrician and operator. "Operators are the guys who are using the equipment all day – they see things we don't," explained Farrar. "When Richard Marshall sits at the same meeting with guys covered in concrete, they're all at the same level... We don't differentiate between maintenance people and operations because we're one big team. Operators do an awful lot of maintenance work in cleaning, lubrication, inspection and tidying." The 100-year-old Halifax site, which produces over a million paving slabs a month, provides plenty of work, said Farrar. Concrete manufacture is nothing but eclectic. Teams can be faced with heavy machinery for dry polishing, fragile precision weighing systems, brand new kit and rebuilt relics from the 1980s. Farrar said: "We have aggressive materials, a whole mixture of machines, plant, processes, legislation, many constraints, customer demands and expectations to deal with on a daily basis. We do this with people." Pepsi takes maintenance to the max Just over the county border in Skelmersdale, Lancashire, another factory is profiting from people power. "Over 90% of our planned maintenance is done by the frontline team – the individuals who operate within the area of that equipment," Ian Rigby, site engineering manager at PepsiCo, told delegates. "All the operators, the manufacturing technicians, the employees, they all stay where they are. They do their maintenance, they'll change bearings and they'll change belts." This is maintenance the PepsiCo European Maintenance Methodology way. The ideology is one of precision, multi-skilling and infinite adaptability. It's the manufacturing equivalent of Total Football – a Dutch football philosophy that coached players to excel in multiple positions rather than be restricted to one. Success, whether on the sportsfield or shopfloor, depends on specialist coaching to develop the breadth of skills required. "The key to this has been developing and nurturing talent – not just within the engineering support team, but within our frontline team," said Rigby. A four-year programme has mapped out Skelmersdale's skills base and graded employees with a one to five rating across three key competencies, said Rigby. These include operational skills, business acumen such as attitude or decision making and, most crucially said Rigby, technical prowess. "It's not about 'I understand how to fix a piece of equipment, or a bearing or a belt when it's broken'. It's about understanding the principle of how it's supposed to work. It's a subtle but crucial difference." Rigour is instilled at an onsite maintenance academy providing NVQ Level 2 linked training modules. An academy might sound beyond the budget of your average SME, but a training facility doesn't have to cost the earth, assured Rigby. "This isn't a training facility that will cost you a lot of money. It cost us £14,000-£15,000. It contains broken bearings, which we've split apart to show how a bearing operates, and pneumatic rigs." Not everyone is expected to become an instant maintenance expert, Rigby stressed. Employees who need a little extra nurturing are given the opportunity to improve. "It isn't pitched in a way that you're not hitting the grade. If you're not hitting a proficiency level of three for decision making ,which is you find it difficult to apply 5 Why or to understand if your asset isn't performing to its optimum, we'll develop interventions that help close that gap. It's individual, specific performance development." The painstaking commitment to crafting a multi-skilled maintenance team has paid off. Skelmersdale has seen a 17% improvement in unplanned downtime, a 59% improvement in planned maintenance work and 15% improvement on cost. The site's ethos has helped land a world-class award from Manchester University, judged against European maintenance methodology. All achieved through 360 maintenance-smart operators and technicians, 16 skilled technicians and 13 engineering support staff. Rigby added: "It's not achieved through having a fantastic maintenance management system or fantastic assets. It's all been delivered through our people... we do it right first time by investing in our frontline teams." You can't survive without a strategy Great people galvanised by a clear maintenance strategy – this was an apparently obvious combination that most UK manufacturers continued to miss, remarked Dave Peart, maintenance consultant at the Sora Group. "In our work with over 40 companies, most couldn't demonstrate a clear maintenance strategy. They couldn't tell you in a sentence what their maintenance strategy was." Maintenance departments were often factory hinterlands, said Peart. Isolated, abandoned and largely lawless regions. "The maintenance objectives aren't linked to the company targets: there's no policy deployment. The maintenance department does what it does, rather than what the company needs it to do." Reunification meant getting back to basics, according to Peart. "Before choosing whether to use TPM, RCM or condition-based maintenance... you need to get these points sorted in your head. Production takes priority: you are only there as a maintenance department to make parts." Making sure you made the optimum amount was a matter of picking the right metric, he added. "Don't blind everybody with mean times to repair or mean time between failure, just stop doing that. Have a simple measure – you can pick number of hours down, for example. Have a measure that you can track so that if you're getting better, that number's getting smaller or bigger." Breakdown rate was a brilliant starting point, Peart advised. "The percentage of time the kit is down over the run time – that's by far the clearest measure we've found." With the right measure in place, you can then chase the panacea of zero reoccurrence, concluded Peart. "If it breaks, fix it quicker, don't let it break again and stop it breaking in the first place. There's your maintenance strategy for you... If your strategies can be linked to that, you're on to a winner." Lessons from Nasa And if you're struggling to achieve lift off in the quest to eliminate potential failures, you could always look to the stars, advised Farrar of Marshalls. "The two things Nasa uses are root cause and Kepner Tregoe. They didn't put rockets on the moon without testing what might go wrong first." Turning your maintenance department into mission control requires little more than a few whiteboards and a good facilitator, Farrar said. "Take two white boards:?on the first, you categorise what the piece of plant does, the way it failed, what the failure mode was and what you saw. Then, on the second whiteboard, identify the actions: redesigning the machine, looking at the way it's operated or the way it's maintained." However, the technique's biggest asset is not the sophistication of its sums, added Farrar. "Two whiteboards are brilliant because you can get people around and involve them – if you can involve people, then you empower them." The anecdote summed up the WM Maintenance Conference's enduring message. For all the clever systems, methodologies and miracle cures, the heart of great maintenance begins with effective people management. If the top bods at Nasa recognised that as they looked to land a man on the moon safely, then our own mission to deliver more efficient production runs really needn't be rocket science. Five ways to world-class maintenance

1. Set a strategy Maintenance departments should offer your business a whole lot more than a fourth emergency service. Identify how proactive activities can help to complement the demands of your production teams. Targeted work could enhance output, reduce bottlenecks and banish profit-draining downtime. Bringing your maintenance team out from the shadows could also foster camaraderie and spark ideas with shopfloor colleagues. Factor in a simple metric to monitor success and focus on activities that will prevent a problem before it strikes.
2. Proactive not reactive Reactive maintenance: the system of choice for Lemming Manufacturing plc. Take this route and you'll be treading towards oblivion, with all the blind faith of the famed suicidal rodents. "Your dad did reactive maintenance, your grandad did reactive maintenance," said professor Andrew Starr of Cranfield University. "When you plan to do nothing, you run to failure." The heads-down approach enhances the possibility of a catastrophic failure, delegates heard. Far better to go on the front foot and assess asset lifecycles. Adopting a proactive or predictive maintenance policy will empower you to put a plan B in place for breakdown.
3. Invest in skills development There are no fairy godmothers queuing up to cure manufacturing's skills crisis. So factories need to take the initiative and start growing their own maintenance experts, delegates heard. Pepsico's Skelmersdale site has done just that with a five-year strategy to upskill shopfloor workers with essential engineering skills. The site has achieved world-class maintenance status through a committed investment in NVQ-linked training. An academy system was set up for less than £15,000.
4. Pick the right methodology Picking between RCM, TPM or root cause should be down to personal preference and how things work in practice. TPM was criticised by some as inconsistent depending on which manufacturing sector it was applied in. Marshalls' boss Farrar questioned the potential culture clash with importing a method that was steeped in Japanese rhetoric. Ultimately, it's best not to get too hung up on the three-letter acronyms, maintenance experts advised. Focus hard on getting the best out of your people and pushing together towards the same maintenance goals.
5. Everyone going the extra mile Passion for the perfect job is the elusive X-factor in delivering world-class maintenance. Many factories can create a functional maintenance regime, where problems are fixed and downtime diminishes. However, very few instil a cure-all-ills culture where the norm is not just repairing it, but going on to perform root cause analysis, counter measuring and writing up the recommendations. The difference is down to the role of managers in setting expectations and rewarding best practice. What are you waiting for?