I believe the most important part of being a leader is also being a teacher. Reliability leaders are generally asked to teach and explain new concepts on how to improve the methods being utilized to maintain our facility's equipment. As teachers we sometimes fail to see a contextual change that is so completely obvious to us, but is not even on the radar for the people we are leading.
The first part was on the workshop focused on the tasks to be migrated and how the previous software managed multiple task intervals on the single piece of equipment versus job plan sequencing those activities for a single piece of equipment onto a single PM in Maximo. For example, we have a piece of equipment that has 4 tasks that should be completed our the course of a year:
- 1 Month: Inspect widget maker
- 3 Month: Change air filters on widget maker
- 6 Month: Change oil filters on widget maker
- 12 Month: Verify tolerances on widget maker
In Maximo this will be a single PM with 4 sequenced job plans. This is a key difference between how legacy CMMS software platforms handle tasks compared to modern EAM solutions.
As we discussed the PM setup, we got on the topic of how soon should a maintenance team should get these tasks completed which lead into the next topic for the workshop - metrics. We reviewed SMRP Metric 5.4.10 - PM & PdM Work Order Compliance with the group on the concept of PM completion grace periods. The metric states that PM's tasks should be completed within 20% of the frequency, up to a maximum of 28 days.
Here's a chart based on the SMRP 5.4.10 metric about task interval and grace periods:
I asked the group again what the grace period should be for these 4 tasks we used as an example. I let everyone go back and forth on what the "correct" grace period should be while I put the following grid on a white board:
The grid was supposed to visually show:
- In January and February the team has to do the 1M task.
- In March the team has to do the 1M and 3M tasks.
- In June the team has to do the 1M, 3M and 6M tasks.
- In January the team has to do the 1M, 3M, 6M and 12M tasks.
After walking through what the grid represented I stated to the team that all these tasks should be completed within a 6 day grace period because we're doing a 1 Month PM on the widget maker that just has additional tasks at different intervals.
Task interval != PM Frequency
The maintenance team saw this and looked stunned. We discussed this context reset and discussed what information sources allowed the team to still see sequenced activities as distinct intervals.
So go have a chat with your team and see what they think about PM frequencies. You might be surprised what you hear.