TOP LEADERSHIP FOCUSES FOR IMPROVED RELIABILITY AND COST REDUCTION

Here’s a scenario that may sound eerily familiar – you have a new reliability initiative.

The plans have been drawn, information meetings have been held, and new, trendy terms echo down the halls — but nothing is happening on the plant floor.

Your reliability improvement project is slipping through the cracks. Why does this happen? Often times it’s because our focus is on multiple secondary activities instead of what yields results.

Understanding Project Priorities

IDCON recently participated in a preventive maintenance project at a paper mill in New York. Our responsibility was to lead the documentation of preventive maintenance activities.

Our first recommendation was to review the processes in the mill and assign experienced maintenance people to perform inspections immediately instead of starting with documentation rounds. We knew that if inspections start on day one, you get quicker results than if you're waiting on the documentation process.

This recommendation was quickly quashed because the decision-makers at the paper mill wanted IDCON's part of the project to focus only on documentation, not the processes, which we found highly unusual. After receiving our marching orders, we focused on the documentation process.

A few weeks into the project, after the first round was finished, we wanted to make sure inspections were performed and tested, problems were reported, and repairs were executed. Unfortunately (and incorrectly), the decision-makers at the paper mill insisted the processes were not important at this stage.

"It'll be fine," they said before instructing the team to learn how to enter the inspections into their data management system. IDCON's stance was to let them-continue to use an Excel format until they were tested and implemented.

You can probably guess what happened.