Famed management guru Peter Drucker was spot on years ago, when he coined the phrase “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” That statement is just as true today as it was back then.
Make no mistake: Drucker was not discounting the importance of strategy. Rather, he was stating that for a solid strategy to work and be effective, the culture has simply got to work. In our case, i.e., to devise strategies that improve the reliability and productivity of equipment assets, we need to focus on culture to ensure that those strategies make their way to the plant floor and into the hands of our operators and maintainers.
Over the past 30 years, I’ve observed countless organizations spend countless hours and who knows how many dollars developing RCM-based equipment strategies, maintenance planning, scheduling and work management strategies, TPM strategies, CMMS software strategies, instrumentation strategies, and the like. However, in many instances, we’ve missed the mark on creating a culture.
Early in my career, I thought that driving reliable equipment-asset-performance was about 80% engineering and about 20% business strategy. Today, three decades later, my views are quite different. I now know that the formula is about 10% engineering, about 10% business strategy, and about 80% social psychology, i.e., motivating individuals and groups to work together toward a common goal.
Unfortunately, most of us who are responsible for driving a culture of reliability typically have backgrounds in engineering and/or business management. So, we need to get ourselves educated in a few key areas. Here are some highlights:
1. Before you do anything else, read (or listen to on audio) the book Leading Change, by Dr. John Kotter, Emeritus Professor at the Harvard Business School. Time Magazine called Leading Change one of the 25 most influential business books ever written. It’s well worth your time.
2. Obtain some training on organizational change management, and create a game plan, timeline, critical path, and milestones for making it happen.
3. Focus on your organizational silos. They occur because different functional groups each interpret the mission of the organization in different ways. For example, the sales organization interprets the mission as maximizing sales. Procurement and supply chain interprets it as minimizing cost. The production and operations interpretation is to maximize revenue. Maintenance focuses on minimizing cost. If everyone is focusing on maximizing revenue or minimizing cost, it begs the question, “Who’s watching the bottom line?”
4. Get your metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) right. You may have heard the saying “what gets measured gets done.” This is partly true in that “what gets measured gets rewarded,” and “what gets rewarded gets done.” Thus, your KPIs must be on point. Most maintenance and reliability KPIs are lagging indicators (as if looking in a rear-view mirror). Therefore, it’s important to create leading indicators (as if looking through the front windscreen) to direct behaviors in the direction you want the organization to go.
5. Get rewards right. In most plants, we reward precisely the wrong behaviors. We reward maintenance people with overtime pay (extrinsic rewards) for fixing broken equipment and with recognition from management for getting the plant up and running again. But do we reward them for executing an excellent grease route or executing a high-precision alignment? As previously noted, “what gets rewarded gets done.” Make sure that operations, supply chain, maintenance, and other functional groups are rewarded for desirable behaviors that drive asset performance.
6. Eliminate management by walking around (MBWA). Too much time is spent on email, meetings, and other distractions. Get on the plant floor to find opportunities and to coach, mentor, and guide asset performance.
Strategy may be the brain of asset performance and reliability, but culture is its heart. Your operators and maintainers represent the hand of reliability. Be sure you are supporting them with the type of culture that enables your asset-management strategies to produce real value.TRR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Drew Troyer has 30 years of experience in the RAM arena. Currently a Principal with T.A. Cook Consultants, he was a Co-founder and former CEO of Noria Corporation. A trusted advisor to a global blue chip client base, this industry veteran has authored or co-authored more than 250 books, chapters, course books, articles, and technical papers and is popular keynote and technical speaker at conferences around the world. Drew is a Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE), Certified Maintenance & Reliability Professional (CMRP), holds B.S. and M.B.A. degrees, and is Master’s degree candidate in Environmental Sustainability at Harvard University. Contact him directly at 512-800-6031 or [email protected].
