Improving Maintenance and Reliability Through Cultural Change. Stephen Thomas G.
new way of doing business – the new status quo – now taken for granted? How difficult would it be to try to change the safety culture of your organization today? Pretty tough, I suspect.
I believe the way we do maintenance and reliability can, and will have to, become a part of the fabric and culture of our companies if we are to succeed in our personal goals, and if our companies are to succeed in their business goals.
How do we change the maintenance and reliability practices of our organizations? The change management tools presented in Mr. Thomas’s first book provides ample guidance on that question. However, changing practices and habits of the people also requires understanding and dealing with (and possibly changing) the organizational culture, and organizational culture is the subject of this book. The fact is the best engineering, science, and technology won’t ensure business success in maintenance and reliability. Without these “hard” tools, we won’t have success – granted. But these “hard” tools alone won’t ensure success. The culture of your organization has to be understood and dealt with.
In his newest book, Mr. Thomas has really captured and organized for our use the definitions, tools, methods, elements, case studies, practical guides, and templates that will help us understand organizational culture. Building on the eight elements of the Web of Change from the last book, this new book deals directly with first understanding an organization’s culture, then measuring its readiness for change, and finally sustaining change until it becomes the new culture of the organization.
I met the author, Stephen J. Thomas, many years ago during a major, company-wide maintenance and reliability change initiative that he was then leading. We soon became close associates and eventually enduring friends. I respect Steve immensely and consider him to be one of the smartest, most professional and most trustworthy people I know. Steve’s accomplishments in his long career are remarkable, and I am very proud of him and what he has accomplished — and continues to accomplish today. I am most proud of his generous ethic that drives him to share his experiences with the rest of us, in the interest of helping others succeed in improving business performance through culture change.
I am very enthusiastic about this book because I know it will help many people change the culture of their organizations. These changes will enable improved maintenance and reliability practices to take hold, helping industrial companies reduce the cost and improve the quality of their products – and this will ultimately improve the business performance of those companies. I have had the benefit of reading this book and I can assure you that it will help you deal with the “softer side” of changing the way your company does maintenance and reliability business. I hope you enjoy it and put it to practical use – I have!
Congratulations, Steve, on another important, practical, and valuable contribution to this maintenance and reliability profession of ours!
Robert S. DiStefano, CMRP
Chairman of the Board
Management Resources Group, Inc.
I would like to express my sincere thanks to my publisher Industrial Press, Inc. specifically John Carleo for your faith in my work and the potential value it can deliver, and to Janet Romano for all of the behind-the-scenes work that has gone into the excellent finished product.
I would also like to thank Robert Weinstein for helping provide clarity and focus in order to deliver a better product.
One of the major areas of focus in industry today is that of improving equipment reliability. Why? To insure that production is always available to meet the demand of the marketplace. One of the worst nightmares of any company and those who manage it is to have a demand for product but not be able to supply it because of equipment failure. Certainly this scenario will reduce company profitability and could ultimately put a company out of business.
For some firms, poor reliability and its impact on production are far more serious than for others. For those that operate on a continuous basis – they run 24 hours per day seven days per week – there is no room for unplanned shutdowns of the production equipment; any loss of production is often difficult or even impossible to make up. For others that do not operate in a 24/7 mode, recovery can be easier, but nevertheless time consuming and expensive, reducing profits.
Many programs available in the industry are designed to help businesses improve reliability. They are identified in trade literature, promoted at conferences and over the web, and quite often they are in place within the plants in your own company. Most of these programs are what I refer to as “hard skill” programs. They deal with the application of resources and resource skills in the performance of a specific task aimed at reliability improvement. For example, you decide that you want to improve preventive maintenance (PM). To accomplish this you train your workforce in preventive maintenance skills, purchase the necessary equipment, and roll out a PM program accompanied with corporate publicity, presentations of what you expect to accomplish, and other forms of hype in order to get buy in from those who need to execute it. Then you congratulate your team for a job well done and move on to the next project.
Often at this juncture, something very significant happens. The program you delivered starts strongly, but immediately things begin to go wrong. The work crews assigned to preventive maintenance get diverted to other plant priorities; although promises are made to return them to their original PM assignments, this never seems to happen. Equipment that is scheduled to be out of service for preventive maintenance can’t be shutdown due to the requirements of the production department; although promises are made to take the equipment off-line at a later time, this never seems to happen. Finally, the various key members of management who were active advocates and supporters at the outset are the very ones who permit the program interruptions, diminish its intent, and reduce the potential value. Often these people do make attempts to get the program back on track, but these attempts are often half-hearted. Although nothing is openly said, the organization recognizes what is important, and often this is not the preventive maintenance program.
I have simplified the demise of the preventive maintenance program in our example. Yet this is exactly as it happens, although much more subtle. In the end, the result is the same. Six months after the triumphant rollout of the program, it is gone. The operational status quo has returned and, if you look at the business process, you may not even be able to ascertain that a preventive maintenance program ever existed at all.
For those of us trying to improve reliability or implement any type of change in our business, the question we need to ask ourselves is why does this happen? The intent of the program was sound. It was developed with a great deal of detail, time, and often money; the work plan was well executed. Yet in the end there is nothing to show for all of the work and effort.
Part of the answer is that change is a difficult process. Note that I didn’t say program, because a program is something with a beginning and an end. A process has a starting point – when you initially conceived the idea – but it has no specific ending and can go on forever.
Yet the difficulty of implementing change isn’t the root cause of the problem. You can force change. If you monitor and take proper corrective action, you may even be able over the short term to force the process to appear successful. Here, the operative word is you. What if you implement the previously-mentioned preventive maintenance program and then, in order to assure compliance, continually monitor the progress. Further suppose that you are a senior manager and have the ability to rapidly remove from the process change any roadblocks it encounters as it progresses. What then? Most likely the change will stick as long as you are providing care and feeding. But what do you think will happen if after one month