The world of reliability and maintenance is like most other professions with unique words, phrases, and terminology. Many of us grew up with this “language,” which makes some of the jargon and acronyms second-nature (“reliability-speak” and “maintenance-speak”). But when we interact with the uninitiated in the “outside world,” listeners sometimes think we’re speaking (or writing, texting or emailing) in a foreign language.
In fact, reliability and maintenance terminology differs from industry to industry and geographic region to region. During my work around the world, all over North America, in more than 400 plants, across some 45 different industries, I, too, have been confused by some of the words and phrases used in discussions on reliability and maintenance issues. So imagine a raw recruit entering the mysterious world of reliability and maintenance and having to navigate communications gaps, confusion, and errors that can be attributed to the words more-seasoned pros use as second nature.
To help ensure clear understanding and communication, when my daughter came to work with me years ago, she developed her own “glossary of jargon.” But, what about others—especially decision-makers in today’s plants and facilities—who listen with frustration as we baffle them with our unique language? To borrow a line from the movie Cool Hand Luke, “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”
Sometimes we use reliability- or maintenance-speak to communicate something really important about why something happened, but the listener just isn’t listening. “What?” “Huh?” i.e., “I’m sorry. I wasn’t listening.” (That was basically the disconnected dialogue between the prison warden and Johnny in the 1997 movie Johnny Bravo.) Tell me you haven’t had similar situations in routine communications about reliability and maintenance issues where you work.
A SOCIETY OF ACRONYMS
We certainly are engaged in a jargon- and acronym-rich business. For example, we often have to determine what caused a problem with a critical piece of equipment. What happens next can spawn confusion. We can talk about root-cause analysis (RCA); root-cause-failure analysis (RCFA); failure analysis (FA); failure-modes-and-effects analysis (FMEA); finite-element analysis (FEA)… only to hear words of frustration: “I don’t care what the heck you call what you’re about to do. I just want to know what caused this thing to stop in the middle of the day!”
Then we also have an alphabet-soup of three-letter acronyms (TLAs). You know them. They range from CBM and PdM to RCM and TPM, TQM and SPC to LCC and MDT. The list continues with two- and four-letter variants such as PM, BM, MTTR, MTBF, MTBM, and CMMS… and we have to arrange these clever TLAs so there are NO vowels that prevent them from being pronounced easily—so we spell them out like PLC and DCS. Of course, vowels occasionally creep in with CAD, CAM, OEE, and ERP. (Excuse me: It’s best not to pronounce the last two.)
Sometimes we also mix in letters and numbers. That’s our attempt to communicate something that must be really, really big and important, such as ISO 50000, ISO 31000, ISO 9000, ISO-TS 16949, ISO 14000, and OSHA 1910.
In past decades, Lean Manufacturing (LM) and Japanese and German words crept into many companies, thus providing even more ways to baffle ourselves and others with “lean-speak” mixed with our own vocabularies of reliability- and maintenance-speak. We start with the basics of 5S, KAIZEN, TPS, and the German/Japanese term TAKT. Then comes KANBAN, JIDOKA, HEIJUNKA, and, importantly, POKA-YOKE for “mistake-proofing,” because it’s not polite to use BAKA-YOKE (fool- or idiot-proofing).
Of course, scientific Greek language creeps in with SIX SIGMA (the lowercase Greek letter s), which leads into ANSI/ISA 88, IEC 62264. These terms, subsequently, have to be followed up with the words Champion, Master Black Belt, Black Belt, and Green Belt. But that’s not all. At this point, we certainly can’t overlook the six-sigma tools of DMIAC and DMADV, or DFSS plus SIPOC or PARETO (named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, 1848-1923).
As the business of reliability and maintenance is connected to the business of the business, we often hear (and sometimes actually speak) the “R” words RONA, ROFA, RAV, ROCA, ROA, ROTA, and other real and made-up terms to describe a financial return on assets of sorts.
Finally, no discussion of reliability and maintenance terminology would be complete without highlighting the acronyms for our professional associations SMRP, IAM, AFE, APICS, AMP, and SME, to name a few, along with their respective certifications CMRP, MAIM, CPMM, CPE, CPS, CPIM, CSCP, CIRM, CFPIM, CMfgT, CmfgE, and CEM. Put those certifications on your resume along with the colleges and universities you attended, and you get to add UTK, UofM, MSU, TAMU, UCLA, MIT, UGA, AU, USC, ISU, UT, and FSU, among others, with whatever BA, BS, AS, MS and/or PhD degrees you earned.
The reliability and maintenance fields have clearly done a good job in contributing to the growing society of acronyms.
THE POINT OF ALL THIS
Most of us have encountered someone who doesn’t speak our language—for most of our readers, that’s American English. Thus, we should remember what it’s like NOT to understand or to be understood. As Stephen Covey professed in Habit 5 of his best-selling Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989): “Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood.” Awash with so many unique utterances and spoken shorthand elements that come to our lips as second nature, however, we often forget when we speak.
If you notice a bewildered look on the face of others as you speak the languages of reliability and maintenance, take a step back and think about what you are really trying to communicate. As the younger generation explores and enters their new careers in our field, it will have an overwhelming amount of skills and knowledge to embrace and learn—not to mention countless straightforward and valuable concepts that are promoted through confusing jargon and acronyms.
So we use jargon here? Guilty! After all, the word “jargon” typically means the specialized language used by people in the same line of work or profession. Consider, however, that the pervasiveness of the terms “maintenance and reliability” and “(M&R”) and “reliability and maintenance” (“R&M”) in our profession. What’s the difference (or problem)? Answer: The “and” word (or ampersand) conflates the two terms in a way that presumes maintenance people are responsible for reliability and vice versa. Or does it? Operations, engineering, procurement, installation, and a host of other functions and activities are also responsible for asset life-cycle reliability. This, in turn, is very confusing in a world of ISO 55000 and the next generation entering the workforce, especially when we also use “M&R” as “maintenance and repair” or ” R&M” as “repair and maintenance.” Got it?
Near the end of the movie Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman’s character, the reprobate inmate Luke, repeated the memorable words he had learned from the sadistic guard: “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” Let’s be careful that we in the reliability and maintenance community don’t allow that thought to take hold in our plants and facilities.TRR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bob Williamson is a long-time contributor to the people-side of the world-class-maintenance and manufacturing body of knowledge across dozens of industry types. His background in maintenance, machine and tool design, and teaching has positioned his work with over 500 companies and plants, facilities, and equipment-oriented organizations. Contact him directly at 512-800-6031 or [email protected].
Tags: reliability, availability, maintenance, RAM, professional development, plant operations
