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Ineffective vehicle maintenance results in breakdowns and unscheduled downtime. These are costly – in both time and money – and often cause a ripple effect. Because yesterday’s maintenance paradigms and strategies for dealing with these occurrence are obsolete, there is a new mission for maintenance.

The new mission of maintenance

March 10, 2017
Continuous improvement in vehicle maintenance is the new goal.

After 5,000 years of preventive maintenance (PM) – preventive maintenance inspections were done on the great pyramids - why is it that this routine activity is not universally employed by vehicle fleets? Why are vehicle maintenance departments still having to argue for resources? Why is it that more than 70 percent of all organizations with physical assets only have a rudimentary PM system or none at all?

One key to these mysteries is in human nature. Human nature makes us very reluctant to invest time and resources into something that might happen. We are mostly short-term beings, interested in results now, not a year from now. The PM approach is all about what might happen.

Another key has to do with answering the question: What does top management really want from the maintenance function? This is a non-trivial question because many managers cannot verbalize the answer. That leaves maintenance professionals serving many “masters” – those with different daily opinions based on the pressures of the day.

Three Scenarios

Consider the accompanying mental model graphic that shows three ways to manage a fleet’s physical assets. The X-axis is time or utilization. As you move to the right on this axis, more mileage has been driven.

The Y-axis is the number of breakdowns or disruptive incidents. The more breakdowns, the higher the curve. Eventually, everything wears out.

The first breakdown is on the left side of each curve, just where the curve starts at the X-axis. The last breakdown is on the right most side of the curve where it intersects with the X-axis.

Each of the three scenarios reflect the average life of all assets under that program. For example, in the first scenario, if you operate a fleet of cars and don’t do any maintenance, they will have a certain average breakdown rate. If you add PM activity – the second scenario - the average vehicle is extended. In the last scenario, the cars have been re-engineered for improved reliability by switching to new models or changing components.

Curve Descriptions

- BS (Breakdown Scenario)

This curve is closest to the Y-axis because, characteristically, the mean time between failure (MTBF) – the average amount of time that a device or product functions before failing – occurs in a shorter interval. In this scenario, no PM is done or the PM that is done is ineffective.

This is an environment where chaos reigns. While some days it is really quiet, most of the time many assets are “down” or stranded alongside the road.

The consequences of the breakdown scenario are many. The environment is usually chaotic, high stress and routinely requires heroism just to get a vehicle up and running. The level of safety might be lower than a PM-dominated shop of the same size and type as people tend to burn out.

Also in this scenario, you are likely to get a lot of “BS.” There will always be excuses about why this didn’t run, why the job is not complete and so on.

- PMS (Preventive Maintenance Scenario)

In this situation, you start going out looking for problems. Then, you take concrete actions to extend the life of the equipment and to detect impending failure. The focus here is on investigation of the critical wear points and tasks performed now that detect or defer the future breakdown.

Equipment lasts longer, but the PMS requires money, time, thought and management. Many firms are unwilling to commit these resources to make repairs or get replacements before failure. When not enough investment is made in PM, the fleet reverts to the breakdown scenario.

- MIS (Maintenance Improvement Scenario)

This scenario is the holy grail of the maintenance department: to, paradoxically, get out of the maintenance business. MIS means getting out there and fixing the problems permanently. Resolving them in such a way that the expected failure rate drops to a tenth or a fifth of what it was.

This, by the way, is one of the stated goals of reliability-centered maintenance (RCM), which is basically the process of determining the most effective maintenance approach.

Solving problems permanently is one of the most rewarding facets of maintenance. However, it typically requires redesign, repurposing, respecification and reengineering.

Fundamental Questions

Today, old maintenance paradigms and strategies are obsolete. We must now ask fundamental structural questions about what type of tasks maintenance personnel should do and who should do these maintenance tasks. The key question is: What is the mission of maintenance?

There used to be many different answers to this question; as many as there were organizations asking the question. The mission ranged from quick reaction times, fixing breakdowns, to reducing downtime, to focusing on cost control, to concentrating on safety, etc.  

All of these missions are good, useful and important. However, they all ignore the deep issue that the fleet organization has changed and there is something very simple that transcends these missions or values.

In today’s organizations, the creed is that everyone must add value to the product or service. Everyone and everything is expendable or outsourceable. There is a conflict between the old mission statements and the new culture.

The new mission of the maintenance department is to provide reliable physical assets and excellent support for customers by reducing and eventually eliminating the need for maintenance services.

Change of Mind

This requires a rethinking of traditional roles. Maintenance must merge with machine, building and tools to integrate maintainability improvements into designs on an ongoing basis.

In addition, routine maintenance activity will be increasingly merged into operations. Consider the TPM (total productive maintenance) model. This holistic approach to equipment maintenance, which includes equipment operators, aims at achieving an optimal production environment free of defects, breakdowns, downtime and accidents.

There is a traditional attitude on the part of maintenance that all breakdowns are the same and all are just as bad. The feeling is: If it’s broke, it’s broke.

This acceptance of the status quo is now intolerable and unacceptable in maintenance. A breakdown should be viewed with an analytical eye to see what difference it made, if any. Any money spent must be justifiable in light of the consequences of failure.

A Fit

Does PM have a place in the new maintenance structure? The fatal flaw of the old type of PM is that it requires constant investment of labor and materials. In most cases, there is no relationship between the cost of the consequences of the failure and the cost of the PM service.

The financial relationship between failure consequences and tasks must be built. Preventive maintenance optimization (PMO) – a concentrated effort to identify and eliminate gaps and inefficiencies in maintenance strategy – can be employed to make great strides in alignment of the task costs to the failure mode consequences.

There is another problem. PM institutionalizes the status quo. No permanent improvement will ever flow from a traditional PM orientation.

When PM is deferred, the MTBF curve will return to its old breakdown frequency. Then, the third curve – the maintenance improvement scenario – must be added into the priorities of the department to return to the new mission: to provide reliable physical assets and excellent support for customers by reducing and eventually eliminating the need for maintenance services.

There is a Place

In this context, there is a place for PM in the new organization. First and foremost, view PM as a manager of consequence. To eliminate maintenance efforts, look at PM as a way station or resting place on the way to maintenance elimination.

When you don't have the time, resources or technology to figure out the root cause of a failure, you can use a PM approach to reduce your exposure (consequences) to breakdowns.

How do we re-create maintenance with the new mission? Continuous improvement in the delivery of maintenance is the new goal. The bulk of management time, money and effort must go to reducing the labor, parts, utilities and overhead, or to increasing uptime. The stakes are high: the survival of your organization.

Joel Levitt is director of projects for Reliabilityweb.com’s Reliability Leadership Institute. Reliabilityweb.com provides the latest reliability and uptime maintenance news and educational information. He is also author of Fleet Maintenance’s Management Column.

About the Author

Joel Levitt | President, Springfield Resources

Joel Levitt has trained more than 17,000 maintenance leaders from more than 3,000 organizations in 24 countries. He is the president of Springfield Resources, a management consulting firm that services a variety of clients on a wide range of maintenance issues www.maintenancetraining.com. He is also the designer of Laser-Focused Training, a flexible training program that provides specific targeted training on your schedule, online to one to 250 people in maintenance management, asset management and reliability.  

About the Author

David A. Kolman | Contributor - Fleet Maintenance

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