In an operation with just 50 maintainers, annual maintenance costs can easily exceed $10 million. The more reactive (chaotic) your work environment is, the more you will be spending. Would you be interested in saving $2 million from that? In most organizations, there is potential to save 20% or more of your ongoing maintenance costs. On top of that, if you are able to sell whatever you can produce, your revenues could see a substantial boost due to added reliability of what you are maintaining. In those cases it’s not unusual to see revenues grow by an order of magnitude beyond the value of the costs saved. Save $2 million and gain another $20 million, and it will cost you less than $1 million to achieve at very low risk.
In maintenance and reliability, the transformation of performance is mainly about doing the basic right, and only a little about the tools and methods you engage. Wherever asset performance is lower than desired, and maintenance is chaotic, we find that doing the “basics” is most of what is needed to turn things around.
I’ve been speaking with corporate business transformation leaders, and it seems that many of them have seen their transformation programs put on hold. In one case, that program was put on hold in favor of getting back to basics. I thought, “how ironic is that?” If the transformation is about doing the basics well, then why put it off?
I am shaking my head in wonderment at that. Perhaps they thought didn’t know that their transformation is really about doing the basics well. Spend a little, spend it on very low risk activities, and get a lot back. And they put it on hold! Of course doing the basics well when the environment is chaotic is a challenge. As the saying goes, “it’s difficult to remember that you are there to drain the swamp while battling the alligators”.
The alligators in this case are all the big breakdowns that demand your attention and drain your resources. They should be dealt with first – and we have ways to do that!
Managing the bigger change (draining the swamp), whether it is back to basics or some other new technology being introduced is always challenging. In the M&R field the biggest challenges are seldom technical – we know what we should be doing already. But we don’t always do it. We need to transform behaviors, processes, and more importantly, the interactions among processes and people, to actually return to doing the right things (which we already know), the right way (which we also know). That is what I’d call draining the swamp.
In M&R the biggest challenges arise from the involvement of multiple business functions. For instance, you can’t improve maintenance planning and scheduling without the involvement of stores, purchasing and operations. It’s that multi-function participation, in a siloed organization that makes the transformation so difficult. Organizations are not structured to handle that sort of change. Arguably, they are purposely designed to resist that change. After all, if they were set up correctly in the first place, why change them? But were they?
You can get some insights into the sort of problems that need to solved and some idea of how to solve them in my new book, “Uptime for Executives” (click the title to be taken to the bookstore for the EBook). Hard copy book to follow.
