For a maintenance department to understand the “who” and “what” factors in equipment or process failures, it first must understand what the department actually controls and what it simply manages. There’s a big difference, one that involves the relationships a maintenance department has with others.
I’ve often emphasized the importance of building strong relationships inside and outside of an organization. Others have, too.
As management guru Margaret Wheatley noted in her 2006 book Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, “In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The pattern of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions.” The reliability, availability, and maintenance (RAM) arena is a testament to this.
To be successful in its mission, i.e.,to provide adequate levels of equipment reliability and availability according to pre-defined service-level agreements, goals, and expectations, a maintenance department must strive to establish healthy working relationships on two levels:
1. Inter-departmental relationships between the maintenance department’s clerical staff, trades, planners, schedulers, supervisors, and managers
2. Intra-departmental relationships between the maintenance department and its client base, i.e., production, purchasing, accounting, human resources, finance, IT; and relationships with outsiders, i.e.,suppliers, contract specialist, and consultants, among others.
NOTE: This article explores the human relationship effect within a corporation. An important third, non-personal, relationship level also exists between man and machine based on a sensory understanding of the machine under different operating conditions.
This third relationship will be explored further in a future article.
Establishing (and fully understanding) the types of personal relationships mentioned here requires the building of a modified value stream that diagrammatically maps the upstream inputs flowing into the maintenance department against the downstream output deliverables the department provides to its clients. These value streams are built on two levels:
1. Department Level. Identifies the internal (corporate) and external groups that provide inputs to the maintenance department, balanced against the internal and external groups that maintenance serves. With, possibly, a few exceptions, the input side often is identical to the output side. The maintenance department must manage these types of relationships on a daily basis.
2. Relationship Level. Defines individual Internal inter/intra-departmental and external relationships through the identification of the material and information flow required to perform each specific function the maintenance department performs on a daily basis. Typical functions include, among others, asset-lifecycle management, work-order management, inventory management, document and record management, contract management, invoice reconciliation, and the like. Input requirements and output deliverables are analyzed and expressed in terms of requests, specific documents, access, agreements, compliance requirements, services (labor, skills), products (parts/tools), and funding.
These types of Input/Output maps leta maintenance department and its partners or clients see who/what maintenance relies on to perform their business and, similarly, who/what relies on the maintenance department for the well being of their operation. Value-mapping also identifies where efforts overlap between different departments and job positions; highlights duplication; and pinpoints “bottleneck relationships” that can interfere with a maintenance department’s ability to deliver on service agreements.
That last point regarding “bottleneck relationships” clearly illustrates a type of “control vs. manage” issue confronting maintenance departments: Bottlenecks often are not controlled by maintenance, but must be managed. For example, a maintenance manager is responsible for managing all equipment repairs, but is not always able to control access to the equipment (production), access to parts (purchasing), or access to funds (management, accounting). Thus, he or she must rely on a mutual working relationship with others to deliver on the maintenance mandate.
Once a maintenance department gets a handle on what it actually controls (as opposed to what it merely manages), it needs to track it. I’ll be covering that type of tracking in my next article for The RAM Review.TRR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ken Bannister has 40+ years of experience in the RAM industry. For the past 30, he’s been a Managing Partner and Principal Asset Management Consultant with Engtech industries Inc., where he specializes in helping clients implement best-practice asset-management programs worldwide. A founding member and past director of the Plant Engineering and Maintenance Association of Canada, he is the author of several books, including three on lubrication, one on predictive maintenance, and one on energy reduction strategies, and is currently writing one on planning and scheduling. Contact him directly at 519-469-9173 or [email protected].
