How Do I Create a Sustainable Reliability Program? What Elements Are Included?

Creating a sustainable reliability program requires the right people, processes, and technology from the beginning. In addition, companies must commit to a real change in corporate culture, set clear and measurable goals, and reward correct actions that ensure a reliability-focused environment can be truly sustainable in the long run.

What Elements Are Included in Sustainable Reliability?

According to a survey of maintenance managers, respondents shared that 13 percent of all their maintenance was permanently reactive and 17 percent of participants have abandoned past proactive attempts. Only 10 percent of those participating believed they had a strong proactive maintenance program, which means a great opportunity still exists for the majority of companies.

Here are key components of a successful, sustainable reliability program:

Establish Tiered Reliability from the Start

As with any major program implementation, it's important to get off on the right foot. Unfortunately, many organizations tend to look at maintenance in unsustainable ways. For example, some companies attempt to maintain all assets by scheduling preventive maintenance far into the future, or by overstaffing. Other businesses do attempt to divide critical assets from non-critical ones, prioritizing those that require maintenance. However, unless that company has implemented a data-driven method of determining the correct level of maintenance, resources are often wasted. The problem with the status quo is often, these approaches are simply not flexible enough for a dynamic organization. As a result, they become unsustainable in the long-term.

Instead, best practice reliability-centered maintenance programs will establish a tiered approach. This means that entry-level maintenance technicians can use simple tools and basic skills to screen all assets. More experienced staff using sophisticated tools can then diagnose common problems and look for root causes of problems. Finally, the most experienced staff members focus their time and attention on using advanced analytical tools to evaluate complex faults and complicated root causes.

Select the Right Technology

Once you establish a tiered reliability framework, it's important to select the correct technology that matches your critical failure modes. Although a myriad of technologies can provide basic information and some analytics when used by an experienced employee, it's important to select a solution that can support a tiered maintenance approach. This means your solution must be able to collect and distribute key data to and from the right team members and help you match tasks to appropriate technicians and tools quickly and easily.

Be sure your centralized computer system allows real-time data entry, real-time issue escalation, the ability for collaboration and comparison, and the structure to allow you to be consistent and repeat necessary tasks.

Effective Data Management

Remember that more data does not necessarily equal better data. In fact, too much of the wrong kind of data can significantly hamper your organization's ability to find and solve problems. Be sure that whatever data you collect will enable quality analysis. This means that all team members should be able to enter and consume data that will make their own jobs and others' jobs easier in the long run.

For example, mobile solutions allow maintenance technicians to immediately enter completed tasks, test results, new problems, or questions at the point of service. Hand-held devices then deliver this real-time information to a central cloud. A system such as a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) can then integrate that information with pre-programmed conditions and generate additional work orders or reports when necessary.

Perhaps the best way to develop your own sustainable reliability program is to learn from others that have addressed real-life problems with this methodology and succeeded in the long-term. Here are four examples of different industries and companies that have traveled unique reliability journeys.

Case Study 1: Eli Lilly Creates Reliability Culture Through Example and Flexibility

Eli Lilly, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, has implemented a wide variety of reliability-related programs over the years. Since the 1990s, Eli Lilly has analyzed processes, conducted failure mode and effects analyses, performed root cause failure analyses, and implemented CMMS software. Based on this experience, management realized that successful reliability-related programs always had a passionate champion, as well as a group of employees who recognized both the requirements and benefits of such a program. The company used these lessons to eventually build its sustainable reliability program.

As the successful divisions were getting noticed, other sites began asking for similar reliability programs. This change from a "pushing" of a new incentive by management to a true desire for improved reliability from the ranks was significant. Eli Lilly established a small reliability steering team in 2011, which was made up of those individuals who were the forerunners within the corporation. This group created a reliability book, a training program, examples of three successful projects, and a flexible implementation plan.

Asking the Right Questions

Eli Lilly's reliability book began by focusing on changing how questions are asked about maintenance issues. The company borrowed a section from Winston Ledet’s article, “How Does Plant Management – and Possibly Corporate Management – Enable Unreliability". In this article, Ledet explains how questions like "When will it be fixed?" have an underlying message to fix the asset quickly, which is part of a reactive maintenance culture. He points out that questions such as "Is it likely to happen again?" instead communicate that it's time to take action now to prevent the same problem from happening again, which tends to reinforce a reliability-based culture.

Showing Application of Reliability Practices

Eli Lilly conducted three demonstration projects in 2011-2012 to show how reliability tools can be applied in a real-life situation. One of these projects worked with a single assembly work center, which had a production rate of 77 units per minute. Just over a year later, that standard rate had increased to 125 units per minute. This 60 percent improvement in output far outweighed the increase in costs of additional maintenance, which included a redesigned adhesive system, a reduced changeover process, and improved service practices on several components.

Making the Cultural Shift from a Reactive to Proactive Environment

Although many organizations understand what an important role corporate culture plays in any successful program implementation, it's sometimes difficult to pinpoint exactly what that means. During Eli Lilly's journey, the reliability team created an excellent example-based document to help the organization make that important cultural shift.

A reactive corporate culture believes that equipment failure is inevitable. People and processes are created to fix broken equipment as fast as possible, and employees are essentially trained to have a short-term focus. Usually, maintenance technicians in a reactive environment are rewarded for fixing problems quickly and not for finding solutions to keep the problem from recurring down the road.

In a proactive culture, by comparison, management has an appreciation and understanding that reliability-based tasks will not have an immediate result. Instead, team members are rewarded for conducting a root cause exercise or successfully detecting a problem before failure occurs. In the long run, these types of activities will result in fewer equipment failures, increased uptime, and better productivity. They will also feed a culture dedicated to reliability.

Standardization of Metrics and KPIs to assess Reliability

Eli Lilly created three global metrics to measure their reliability progress: downtime, mean time between failures (MTBF), and deviations.

At the beginning of the process, Eli Lilly realized that sites were using different measurements to look at downtime. The reliability team standardized measurement of downtime by coming up with 12 reasons for both scheduled and unscheduled downtime and setting the framework for the total number of hours, so that percentages could be compared effectively.

The company used MTBF to discover which assets had the highest failure rates, which allowed sites to focus on reducing that number. Finally, the team studied non-conformance events to understand deviations from equipment performance. By tracking these deviations, the site was able to focus on the most critical assets first.

Implementation Plan

Businesses that take a one-size-fits-all approach to reliability program implementation are likely to fail. Eli Lilly understood its company was too large and diverse in people, places, processes, and problems to mandate a universal program. Instead, Eli Lilly created a basic framework for reliability issues and remained flexible in terms of actual site implementation. That allowed each division to focus on an area of reliability that was most important to them. As a result, team members were more invested in the process and experienced greater, long-term success.

Case Study 2: Two Enthusiastic Leaders Ignite Novelis’ Global Reliability Program

As the largest aluminum rolling company in the world, Novelis operates 28 facilities in four continents. Reliability in manufacturing was paramount to meeting customer demand. When top management decided that equipment breakdowns and process interruptions were simply not acceptable, two passionate employees took on the challenge to build a reliability program from the ground floor.

Program Tenets and Team

Novelis began its program by brainstorming a variety of tenets. For example, the program had to add value on the shop floor, be internally led, and be integrated into existing continuous improvement processes. In addition, the program was designed to focus on education and systems, not on short-term fixes, and it needed to be holistic and seen as a core competency for the company.

Novelis then put together a reliability team of five key employees. The team members came from diverse backgrounds and expertise including both work and maintenance management, mechanical and electrical engineering, preventive maintenance, Six Sigma, and other critical areas.

Assessment

One of the first things the reliability team created was a baseline of performance for its North American plants. The team selected 14 elements and created a self-assessment tool that included 400 questions. Each plant followed written guidelines to score all the questions and, in many situations, worked on cross-functional teams to generate results. Each of the nine plants completed the assessment, and the reliability team then visited the facility for three days to go over results, calibrate scores, and develop action plans. Other sites from around the world began asking to participate in the program.

Training

Once the assessments were completed, the reliability team created a curriculum to train participants. Four sessions took one year to complete and included a one-week classroom session, a one-week hands-on session in a plant, an extensive review, an opportunity to teach back to supervisors, an internal exam and the external Certified Reliability Maintenance Professional exam. The training program was extremely successful and well accepted by not only participants from the nine North American plants, but also by overseas employees who asked to participate.

The curriculum was also available as modules, so that separate workshops could be conducted as needed to more specific audiences.

The Novelis reliability program was successful by many measures. The program resulted in standardized metric sheets, templates, language, training, and reference material across the entire company. In addition, the reliability-focused culture led employees to share success stories and encourage coworkers to continue to find new opportunities. The company is willing to invest long-term and expects steady improvement to follow.