Cover Your A$$ets. John L. Ross
Of course, there have been numerous offshoots of this work, some as recent as 2018 (a point that is relevant depending on when you read this book).
The point? With all the knowledge of all the maintenance managers and maintenance supervisors, and all the collective wisdom of plant engineers and reliability engineers, why is there only interest now on a grand scale for asset management? Because ISO 55000 is not a maintenance book, and it’s not written by maintenance people. It is for those ‘other guys.’ Please, please, please keep this in mind. ISO 55000 is not a maintenance book and it is not written for just maintenance people. It is time for others to step up and get involved in asset management.
My fear, and the honest reason I am concerned? Your boss, or your boss’s boss, is going to assemble a committee, read through ISO 55000, 55001, and 55002 and decide that maintenance needs to up their game. The ‘brass’ might think that in order for your company to be in compliance with the ISO 55000 standards it will take more work from the maintenance department and it will quickly become another maintenance program.
But wait, now we know this isn’t the way to execute asset management, and we should be smart enough not to go down this road again. After all, we know how that movie will end.
In early 1995 I started my civilian career at a manufacturing plant in rural Illinois. I was hired to be the plant engineer, maintenance manager, and maintenance supervisor. This was a metal working facility; they made copper-bottom pots and pans. I’m sure you know the company.
Shortly after I began, our parent company, Corning, committed our company to becoming ISO 9000 certified within a year. There was a lot of office buzz about what ISO was, and what 9000 was all about. I had absolutely no idea what ISO was, and I couldn’t research it easily because the Internet didn’t really exist in 1995. Not in my little plant it didn’t.
We were told that the ISO 9000 certification was a means to ‘vet’ us to our customers. Through this quality standard, our customers could essentially do away with any incoming inspections for quality. And likewise, we would no longer have to inspect incoming raw production principal supplies from our vendors who were also ISO 9000 certified. I don’t think it ever really worked out that way to be honest, but we were successful for our part.
For maintenance, our ISO certification meant that we had to spin up a calibration lab for the tools that the tool and die makers used to make our die sets. Think about that for a minute. We were a global company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Corning (a huge company). We made the die sets in our machine shop that made the pots and pan products we manufactured. All this work was executed daily and we didn’t even have calibrated tools for our die makers. How on earth did we even function back then?
I was responsible for creating an ISO 9000 certifiable tool calibration lab. Again, I was fresh out of the military and I had no idea what ISO meant. We did learn that the certification audit was going to simply be a review of our processes and a confirmation of whether or not we were compliant with our own processes. The mantra was “Say what you do, and do what you say.” Ok, that was simple enough.
My plant was a union plant, so I had to post for a calibration lab technician and the job went to one of my machinists, a lady named Paula. I wasn’t surprised; Paula’s employee number was 3. The other two had died, so she was the odds-on favorite.
Paula did an exceptional job pulling this all together and the details she had to master as a tool maker rolled right into what we needed to keep the calibration paperwork straight. We got certified on our very first attempt. A vetting company came in for the audit and they were amazed at our processes and amazed that we actually did what we said we do. The audit cost $25,000, in 1996. It would have been a tough sell to have to repeat that audit.
I want to share two fun stories regarding our attempt to get ISO 9000 certified. I mention these stories for two reasons: they are interesting and fun, and they show that work can be interesting and fun. If you and your company are going to make a run towards ISO 55000 certification, don’t forget to have fun and learn something along the way.
Paula and I discovered that we had to have ‘standards’ for our machine shop, and that those standards had to be tested on another set of standards, and those standards had to be traceable all the way back to the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). When I say ‘standards’ I don’t mean processes, I mean that we had to have steel blocks of exact measure to calibrate our micrometers and calipers against. Our steel blocks had to be confirmed and certified against the absolute exact standards of the United States.
Paula and I set out to find a calibration lab to partner with. We located one in Chicago and made arrangements to visit and possibly set up a contract for services. For some reason Paula asked if she could drive, and I was in no hurry to drive up to and in Chicago so I had no problem with her request.
On the way out of town, Paula mentioned that she needed some gas, so we pulled into the small gas station on Main Street. I got out to pump the gas, and noted that Paula had pulled her car up to the gas pump on the wrong side. The gas tank door was on the other side of her car. I told Paula this and she said, “Sorry, let me turn around.” Paula went on to execute the most beautiful (I am not making this number up) seventeen point turnaround you have ever seen. She pulled up to the exact same pump in exactly the same orientation. I had not moved one inch. “There,” she said. I shook my head.
In Chicago, we found an eager little calibration company that wanted our business. During a tour of their facility, my interest was captivated by a bell jar sitting on a pedestal in the exact center of their shop. Inside the container was a perfectly smooth, brush metal item roughly the size and shape of an old Zippo cigarette lighter. I was transfixed by this metallic object. I asked the owner what this metal item was and he told me that it was three inches. I asked, “Three inches of what?” “It’s exactly three inches,” was his response.
I had never seen such a thing in my life. I was looking at an object that was precise to 10 millionths of an inch. I’m still fascinated by that experience to this day.
Here is my hope for you, the reader. We may or may not know each other. I would sincerely love to meet and get to know everyone that is interested in advancing the profession of maintenance and asset reliability. We are a small fraternity so we need to work together, but my immediate hope for each of you is that you have great success in this journey towards asset management. Also, that you travel down your own path and at your own pace to become wildly successful. However, do it in the spirit of enjoyment, and have fun. Don’t forget to learn something along the way and share it with others.
Helpful Hints to Get the Most from This Book
In 2018, I completed a bucket-list level ambition and published my first book. My first offering exceeded my greatest expectations and I was very pleased with the work that I had created. The feedback from my first book was 100% positive.
It was during the creation of that book, The Reliability Excellence Workbook: From Ideas to Action that I hit on a method, a genre of book writing. In essence I had stumbled upon a workbook format that delivered exactly what I was hoping to achieve. At an SMRP (Society for Manufacturing and Reliability Professionals) annual conference in Kansas City, MO in 2017, I met the lady who would eventually become my publisher. When Judy Bass asked me to tell her about my book idea, this is what I told her: “I want to write a book that is as if you and I are sitting around a dinner table, drinking coffee, and we are just talking about stuff and I’m sketching out some thoughts on a napkin.” That is literally the first conversation Judy and I had.
That first book delivered on my idea, completely. I wanted a book that allowed me to introduce an idea, ask what you thought about it and we would both generate some anecdotal stories to support the concept. I’d share some world-class principles with you and together we would start to piece together a comprehensive maintenance strategy for you at your location.
I’m