Continuous improvement is alive and well among businesses in today’s competitive and challenging marketplace. Some still call it by the big buzz word of the 1990s: kaizen. Many keep improving because they know it’s possible and much needed in their markets. Others are satisfied with cherry picking only the low hanging fruit.

It’s easy to gather data and opinions about what top-priority reliability issues should be targeted. Sure, reliability is a very broad field which should incorporate equipment availability and maintainability. Reliability, simply put, is equipment doing what it is supposed to do. While a machine’s availability numbers might look quite good by historical comparison, the real question is “does it run as intended every time it’s needed to run?” Or maintainability issues could make it difficult and time-consuming to maintain and repair equipment because of, among other things, its location, inaccessible components, or old-school lubrication technologies.

We, as RAM professionals, typically don’t delve into market demands, customer preferences, or the market impact on our work. But we should. (Coincidentally, Drew Troyer’s two most recent articles on the Availability” specifically address market- and marketing-induced causes of unavailability, see links below.) The fact is, continuous improvement of equipment and process reliability CAN have market-driven purposes. This is a story of one plant’s trials at continuous improvement.

CHERRY PICKING
When the production department complained loudly about too much downtime on several bottleneck machines linked by conveyors in a manufacturing process, big things happened. Reliability-thinking hats were donned and data was collected, analyzed, and then verified by close observation and discussion with various operators.

First off, the maintenance issues were fixed. You know, those pesky little things that we would classify as repeat offenders (the things maintenance technicians could “fix” quickly, but were far from solving the causes of the problems). At that point, production leadership said, “OK, go ahead and take the time get it done right” (as if the luxury of time for dealing with prior events was never denied). Here, two types of cherries were getting picked from the same tree (so to speak): Production got its chronic interruptions fixed. Maintenance got a reduction in the number of trouble calls that interrupted their scheduled work. A win-win.

THREE MAJOR ELEMENTS OF RELIABILITY
Over the course of my career working in hundreds of plants and facilities, there were three major elements in most of the reliability challenges we set out to solve: equipment, work processes, people. These three elements are highly interrelated and interdependent. So, when digging into equipment issues, it pays to investigate how work gets done (work processes) and who is taking action (or inaction) that has an effect on the equipment issues being explored. Equipment-performance problems often can be  solved by looking for common causes and contributing factors in each of the first three elements.

1.   EQUIPMENT. In general equipment should be reliable, efficient, effective, safe, and low cost (not cheap).

 2.  WORK PROCESSES. These represent the procedures, methods, checklists, visual cues, and anything else that defines how work gets done. And yes, this includes the procedures, methods, and systems to collect and analyze data.

 3.  PEOPLE. This element has the highest variability of the three, and often the biggest impact on equipment performance and reliability. There are two major parts of the “People” element: Applied Skills and Knowledge and Work Culture.

      ♦  Applied Skills and Knowledge. This part of the “People” element is about much more than equipment-specific “training.” It includes the performance demonstration (or “qualification”) of all job-critical skills and knowledge that will have an impact on equipment performance and reliability. It also assures “consistency” of skills and knowledge across the work group. And, when any changes are made to equipment or work processes, the associated training and qualification content is updated and redeployed to the work group.

      ♦  Work Culture. Regardless of how accurately the Applied Skills and Knowledge part is structured and how obvious the equipment issues may be, there will always be some who say ,“that’s not MY job.” This is a good example of a work-culture barrier to reliability. A site’s work culture is all about how people behave on the job and the motivating factors. Some of the factors that influence how people behave on the job include:

→  leadership and teamwork

→  motivation and attitudes

→  rewards and recognition

→  available resources

→  accountability

→  reinforcement.

PICKING LOW HANGING FRUIT
So, let’s continue our story to see how the three major elements of reliability work together. More often than not, low hanging fruit is harvested because it’s easy and quick to pick, while the higher fruits are ignored and left to rot. Why is that? Could be laziness, or that we don’t have the time to pick everything. Or, maybe we don’t have the right tools (a ladder, perhaps).

One day, in a senior manager’s meeting, someone showed a report on customer complaints sent to them by the sales and marketing group at the corporate office. Hand wringing ensued, and “we’ve gotta look into this” comments were made. The complaint list was handed off to the Quality Control (QC) Manager, and that was it.

When we investigated this list, however, there were some subtle overlaps with our equipment-reliability issues. One involved a huge number of shrink-wrap complaints; the other involved  “bad” components in assembled consumer-retail packages.

While the inline shrink-wrap machine was a previous RAM target, we had missed the inconsistency of the operator training and qualification and the lack of a clear procedure on how to align the film in the machine. This was a primary cause of the customer shrink-wrap complaints.

The second overlap involved a component fabrication machine, which made a finished product that was included in the consumer retail package. The machine had been a performance and reliability issue from day one. Fortunately, the RAM team eventually corrected most of the design flaws, operational errors, and setup issues. But there some remaining quality issues on a few of the many different products this troublesome machine produced.

The QC reports had been indicating defects in a few of their consumer-package inspection reports which led to opening, inspecting, and replacing any defective components found. This was always a major delay in customer shipments and a costly rework. In these cases, the defects were inspected out. The RAM team then asked, “Was quality being built into the product?” Follow-up conversations with the lead production operator and supervisor (paraphrased below) were eyeopeners that revealed evidence of a departmental work culture being a root cause of the problem.

Supervisor: “We have to make the shift production numbers and there’s NO overtime to get it done.”

Lead Operator: “We set up for a quality run and inspect the best we can. We also over produce knowing that there may be some defects, but they’ll cull those out in final packaging.”

RAM Team: “So, they knowingly produce some defects that go to final packaging. Packaging operators can only see defects that customers and QC inspectors have complained about when the product is opened. Final packaging scheduling does not allow for time nor have a procedure to open and inspect each component for defects.”

So, low-hanging fruit (even though some of it had defects) was sent to final packaging along with the good.

THE MORAL OF THIS STORY
As RAM pros, we can’t overlook the connections between unreliable equipment, work processes, and people. Nor can we only look at equipment data. Bottom line: Get to know more about your site’s (or client’s) equipment, the people who touch and influence it, and the work processes they use.TRR

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Click The Following Links For Drew Troyer’s Recent Articles Discussing
Market- And Marketing-Induced Causes Of Unavailability

October 24, 2021

October 31, 2021

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 vast 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].