The ''Maintenance Insanity'' Cure: Practical Solutions to Improve Maintenance Work. Roger D. Lee
advantages.
Techniques will be shared to allow you to tap into the available resources contained in your hourly workers. Solutions address organizational structure, assessments of present conditions, gap analysis with gap closure plans, behavior/result reinforcement programs, cultural change processes, and work process development. The “Maintenance Insanity” Cure will help develop and drive your new vision to become reality.
The “Maintenance Insanity” Cure provides the answers to address the definition of insanity (a definition frequently credited to Einstein) as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The book contains numerous maintenance solutions from real-life applications that will improve the future of your organization and help you to achieve success in productivity and cost control. Techniques to break the cycle of repeating the same things over and over again will guide you to a new reality. Many practical tools and files described within this book are available for your use at www.maintenanceinsanity.com.
How can we take the mystery out of maintenance? What is so difficult about doing maintenance? The simple answer is “making everyone happy.” With tight cost control and limited resources, maintenance is now being asked to do more with less than at any other time in the past. Ask the people in any maintenance organization what they need, and the single most popular answer is more people. Using the same old outdated processes and throwing more resources at the problem will only result in throwing more money at it. Plus, it is getting harder to find good, skilled resources. One of my mentors (Richard Rossow) shared with me the following saying, which he learned from his stepfather, who said it described his World War II experiences. It seems to fit for most of the present-day maintenance organizations. Known as the “unwilling” motto, it says: “We the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much for so long with so little we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.” Achieving optimum maintenance and reliability for your facility has to become a true partner relationship with operations and all support resources. Our success begins when we realize that we are all in this together.
I am not asking you to change to add more work to your already overloaded day. I am suggesting that you change to improve how you do your work. We will help you determine your present state and then progress to a benchmark application at the end of The “Maintenance Insanity” Cure that offers one possible option for your maintenance and reliability processes no matter the size of your facility. Please allow yourself to be open to the potential described in each solution.
To make you feel better about your present situation, we start with a couple of extreme case studies and a snapshot of “a-day-in-the-life” of a typical mechanic trying to do his or her job in a reactive environment. We next address moving from reactive to proactive work processes with detailed steps to get started. Planning and scheduling start with a day’s and week’s look ahead for beginners and then expands to share different options. Communication is highlighted by a three-legged stool analogy to show the true value of equal partnerships. We touch on cost analysis with a six-bucket process to incorporate all costs including vendors and contractors. A simple tool is provided for tapping into your workforce using positive reinforcement techniques. We will explain ways to do self-assessments and how to get others involved in deep-dive comparisons between sites. Benchmarked-level descriptions are provided to give you a reference point for your site. For a mature culture, a method to perform sales and operations planning is shared to help with forecasting and meeting organizational and customer needs. Specialty topics like handling the transition for an acquisition or merger are explained, and shutdown and turnaround processes are shared since they are different from day-to-day planning and scheduling. The final chapter gives a glimpse at the future for maintenance where operations and maintenance are fully linked with very successful results. Following these examples will allow you to break out of your “insanity” cycle and move into the future you have always dreamed of having.
Big thanks go to Jerry Wilson, a longtime friend, who wrote me a letter of introduction to Terrence O’Hanlon at ReliabilityWeb. Terry accepted my article that became the starting point for The Maintenance Insanity Cure. Terry connected me with Sean Flack, who helped me publish “A Glimpse at the Future” in their Uptime Magazine. After hearing the concept for this book, Sean recommended me to Judy Bass at Industrial Press, Inc. That article is now part of the last chapter of this book.
It has been a great honor to work closely with my editor Judy Bass at Industrial Press and compositor Patricia (Patty) Wallenburg at TypeWriting to make a collection of success stories and maintenance processes into the final version of The Maintenance Insanity Cure and make my dream come true. Without your guidance, this book would not have been possible.
Richard Rossow, thank you for graciously agreeing to write the Foreword for my book. I am grateful for your friendship and mentoring.
Special thanks go to Mike Peterson for all his computer knowledge and IT support to make all the files and figures meet the required specifications for all the readers to be able to enjoy and use.
My sincere thanks and appreciation go to Tom Ewing, Mark Bogle, Jeff Davis, Jerry Wilson, Ron Turner, Ron Broadwater, Mike Warner, Doug Brittain, Jeff Lee, and J. T. Pundt for sharing their insights; serving as mentors; testing, applying, and refining these processes; and being there for support as friends always are.
Roger D. Lee grew up in Louisiana but has lived in Texas, Tennessee, and Singapore and traveled all over the world. He has 43 years of experience in the chemical, refining, metals, and contracting industries with a wide variety of clients across the world. He now lives in Hockley, Texas, to be close to his children and grandchildren. He writes to share his experience and observations of life and to better appreciate all of God’s blessings. He is the president and founder of RDL Solutions, LLC., a general consulting firm dedicated to helping any-size plant or company improve efficiency, cost control, productivity, and reliability. He can be contacted at [email protected].
To help you feel better about your present situation, I will share a couple observations to show “what good does not look like”:
Feel better now? Both of these facilities were stuck in the insanity rut.
An example of a success story occurred at a co-polyester chemical plant in Malaysia. After two years of services, the demand for its product was increasing, but the plant’s reliability and work processes prevented it from meeting the new demand level. This example gives you an idea of how bad things can get if the proper start-up training and processes are not adequate