desk and when the pile got too high, he would pull the waste basket up beside the desk and rake them into it. The mechanics were oilfield hands who thought the solution to a problem was a bigger hammer or a cheaper pipe. I was the start of an experiment to see if having an engineer in maintenance would help.
I started my journey in reliability and added planning and scheduling when I was put in a supervisory role. I went off to a week-long school taught by the “Master.” The main thing that stuck with me is that he would not sign on to help a company if the president was not willing to approve any emergency job that would disrupt the scheduled work. Roger’s book will make it clear how important this discipline is. My company was a large chemical company and they spent freely on development of employees. We learned directly from Deming and Aubrey Daniels as well as other innovators.
We added engineers in maintenance and created a central reliability group. This was when I became acquainted with Roger Lee. He led this group and I saw it as an asset where other managers saw it as interference. Needless to say I got the best and most help from this group and Roger and I, along with many others developed a maintenance program that had such a noticeable impact at our plant site that the company adopted and spread our processes through the company’s other plant sites. Our company eventually established a new business of marketing our maintenance strategies to other companies for a fee based on verifiable savings. Roger moved to the central offices and led this effort.
Roger was a sincere and dedicated student and innovator in our journey. I appreciate the fact that he has documented our efforts and learnings to help others create a better way of handling maintenance. He knows what he is talking about because he has been there and done it. He is not just writing about what he saw or heard about. This was not an easy journey. The people who operated the plant had to cooperate and do some things that were not comfortable for them and did not make sense from their point of view. They had to share some control and we had some tough characters (who acted more like kings in charge of their kingdom). No one likes change. And with changes like those things can get worse before they get better. The real challenge is for the change agent to stay the course when almost everyone is saying that things aren’t working. But when it does start working and the improvements in time and reduced costs are so evident, even the kings want to know how you are doing it.
One of the greatest myths in maintenance is that improved reliability increases maintenance costs. On the contrary—done properly, as the strategies in this book teach, reliability and significant cost reduction always go hand in hand.
I encourage you to find and use the strategies in this book that will best fit your needs. It took us about 20 years to develop and implement these strategies and I would say that no organization effectively uses all of them. This isn’t a step-by-step approach to improving your efforts, but rather a smorgasbord of opportunities for improvement that can be implemented one at a time based on your needs.
Richard Rossow
September, 2017
This book will focus on leveraging the wisdom of experience to share learnings gained and help you change work processes to yield ongoing developmental advantages.
Techniques will be shared to allow you to tap into the available resources contained in your hourly workers. Solutions address organizational structure, assessments of present conditions, gap analysis with gap closure plans, behavior/result reinforcement programs, cultural change processes, and work process development. The “Maintenance Insanity” Cure will help develop and drive your new vision to become reality.
The “Maintenance Insanity” Cure provides the answers to address the definition of insanity (a definition frequently credited to Einstein) as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The book contains numerous maintenance solutions from real-life applications that will improve the future of your organization and help you to achieve success in productivity and cost control. Techniques to break the cycle of repeating the same things over and over again will guide you to a new reality. Many practical tools and files described within this book are available for your use at www.maintenanceinsanity.com.
How can we take the mystery out of maintenance? What is so difficult about doing maintenance? The simple answer is “making everyone happy.” With tight cost control and limited resources, maintenance is now being asked to do more with less than at any other time in the past. Ask the people in any maintenance organization what they need, and the single most popular answer is more people. Using the same old outdated processes and throwing more resources at the problem will only result in throwing more money at it. Plus, it is getting harder to find good, skilled resources. One of my mentors (Richard Rossow) shared with me the following saying, which he learned from his stepfather, who said it described his World War II experiences. It seems to fit for most of the present-day maintenance organizations. Known as the “unwilling” motto, it says: “We the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much for so long with so little we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.” Achieving optimum maintenance and reliability for your facility has to become a true partner relationship with operations and all support resources. Our success begins when we realize that we are all in this together.
I am not asking you to change to add more work to your already overloaded day. I am suggesting that you change to improve how you do your work. We will help you determine your present state and then progress to a benchmark application at the end of The “Maintenance Insanity” Cure that offers one possible option for your maintenance and reliability processes no matter the size of your facility. Please allow yourself to be open to the potential described in each solution.
To make you feel better about your present situation, we start with a couple of extreme case studies and a snapshot of “a-day-in-the-life” of a typical mechanic trying to do his or her job in a reactive environment. We next address moving from reactive to proactive work processes with detailed steps to get started. Planning and scheduling start with a day’s and week’s look ahead for beginners and then expands to share different options. Communication is highlighted by a three-legged stool analogy to show the true value of equal partnerships. We touch on cost analysis with a six-bucket process to incorporate all costs including vendors and contractors. A simple tool is provided for tapping into your workforce using positive reinforcement techniques. We will explain ways to do self-assessments and how to get others involved in deep-dive comparisons between sites. Benchmarked-level descriptions are provided to give you a reference point for your site. For a mature culture, a method to perform sales and operations planning is shared to help with forecasting and meeting organizational and customer needs. Specialty topics like handling the transition for an acquisition or merger are explained, and shutdown and turnaround processes are shared since they are different from day-to-day planning and scheduling. The final chapter gives a glimpse at the future for maintenance where operations and maintenance are fully linked with very successful results. Following these examples will allow you to break out of your “insanity” cycle and move into the future you have always dreamed of having.
Big thanks go to Jerry Wilson, a longtime friend, who wrote me a letter of introduction to Terrence O’Hanlon at ReliabilityWeb. Terry accepted my article that became the starting point for The Maintenance Insanity Cure. Terry connected me with Sean Flack, who helped me publish “A Glimpse at the Future” in their Uptime Magazine. After hearing the concept for this book, Sean recommended me to Judy Bass at Industrial Press, Inc. That
