nothing in the documentation can be argued against, although we may try. The paradox is that it all makes such common sense. As we know, common sense isn’t always that common.
But haven’t we seen this movie before?
I purposefully started this chapter by mentioning that I was troubled and concerned. I went further to reveal that I was writing this book under duress. Let me explain.
I’ve been in maintenance for a long time, and I have the hairline to prove it. In fact, I would put my bona fides up against anyone’s to prove that I am confident in what I say and do. I spent eleven years as an aircraft maintenance officer in the United States Air Force, sixteen as a plant maintenance manager or plant engineer, and seven as a reliability consultant. I believe I’ve consulted or worked in every industry you could name and on almost every continent. No, I take that back. I’ve never worked in the whaling industry in Antarctica. But I’ve been around.
Throughout my thirty-four-year career in maintenance and reliability, there has been a common thread. This thread ran through the military, private industry, and almost all the plants and facilities I’ve consulted in. What is this common denominator? Constantly convincing operations and organizational leadership that we need help with equipment maintenance and reliability. We need access to assets to perform proactive and corrective maintenance. We need money and resources to do our jobs. We need production to stop running equipment into the ground. Why doesn’t anyone else care about the state and the upkeep of the company equipment? Why isn’t anyone listening?
Imagine the surprise of all professional reliability and maintenance experts when they realize that all we needed to do was to publish an international standard to get people hopping to our rescue! Read that last sentence with a dramatic eye roll and as sarcastically as possible.
I asked earlier, haven’t we seen this movie before? You don’t have to go as far back as W. Edwards Deming to begin to see the concept of asset management taking shape. Seiichi Nakajima alluded to our combined interest in asset performance and reliability in his introductory book on Total Productive Maintenance as recently as 1972. Of course, there have been numerous offshoots of this work, some as recent as 2018 (a point that is relevant depending on when you read this book).
The point? With all the knowledge of all the maintenance managers and maintenance supervisors, and all the collective wisdom of plant engineers and reliability engineers, why is there only interest now on a grand scale for asset management? Because ISO 55000 is not a maintenance book, and it’s not written by maintenance people. It is for those ‘other guys.’ Please, please, please keep this in mind. ISO 55000 is not a maintenance book and it is not written for just maintenance people. It is time for others to step up and get involved in asset management.
My fear, and the honest reason I am concerned? Your boss, or your boss’s boss, is going to assemble a committee, read through ISO 55000, 55001, and 55002 and decide that maintenance needs to up their game. The ‘brass’ might think that in order for your company to be in compliance with the ISO 55000 standards it will take more work from the maintenance department and it will quickly become another maintenance program.
But wait, now we know this isn’t the way to execute asset management, and we should be smart enough not to go down this road again. After all, we know how that movie will end.
In early 1995 I started my civilian career at a manufacturing plant in rural Illinois. I was hired to be the plant engineer, maintenance manager, and maintenance supervisor. This was a metal working facility; they made copper-bottom pots and pans. I’m sure you know the company.
Shortly after I began, our parent company, Corning, committed our company to becoming ISO 9000 certified within a year. There was a lot of office buzz about what ISO was, and what 9000 was all about. I had absolutely no idea what ISO was, and I couldn’t research it easily because the Internet didn’t really exist in 1995. Not in my little plant it didn’t.
We were told that the ISO 9000 certification was a means to ‘vet’ us to our customers. Through this quality standard, our customers could essentially do away with any incoming inspections for quality. And likewise, we would no longer have to inspect incoming raw production principal supplies from our vendors who were also ISO 9000 certified. I don’t think it ever really worked out that way to be honest, but we were successful for our part.
For maintenance, our ISO certification meant that we had to spin up a calibration lab for the tools that the tool and die makers used to make our die sets. Think about that for a minute. We were a global company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Corning (a huge company). We made the die sets in our machine shop that made the pots and pan products we manufactured. All this work was executed daily and we didn’t even have calibrated tools for our die makers. How on earth did we even function back then?
I was responsible for creating an ISO 9000 certifiable tool calibration lab. Again, I was fresh out of the military and I had no idea what ISO meant. We did learn that the certification audit was going to simply be a review of our processes and a confirmation of whether or not we were compliant with our own processes. The mantra was “Say what you do, and do what you say.” Ok, that was simple enough.
My plant was a union plant, so I had to post for a calibration lab technician and the job went to one of my machinists, a lady named Paula. I wasn’t surprised; Paula’s employee number was 3. The other two had died, so she was the odds-on favorite.
Paula did an exceptional job pulling this all together and the details she had to master as a tool maker rolled right into what we needed to keep the calibration paperwork straight. We got certified on our very first attempt. A vetting company came in for the audit and they were amazed at our processes and amazed that we actually did what we said we do. The audit cost $25,000, in 1996. It would have been a tough sell to have to repeat that audit.
I want to share two fun stories regarding our attempt to get ISO 9000 certified. I mention these stories for two reasons: they are interesting and fun, and they show that work can be interesting and fun. If you and your company are going to make a run towards ISO 55000 certification, don’t forget to have fun and learn something along the way.
Paula and I discovered that we had to have ‘standards’ for our machine shop, and that those standards had to be tested on another set of standards, and those standards had to be traceable all the way back to the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). When I say ‘standards’ I don’t mean processes, I mean that we had to have steel blocks of exact measure to calibrate our micrometers and calipers against. Our steel blocks had to be confirmed and certified against the absolute exact standards of the United States.
Paula and I set out to find a calibration lab to partner with. We located one in Chicago and made arrangements to visit and possibly set up a contract for services. For some reason Paula asked if she could drive, and I was in no hurry to drive up to and in Chicago so I had no problem with her request.
On the way out of town, Paula mentioned that she needed some gas, so we pulled into the small gas station on Main Street. I got out to pump the gas, and noted that Paula had pulled her car up to the gas pump on the wrong side. The gas tank door was on the other side of her car. I told Paula this and she said, “Sorry, let me turn around.” Paula went on to execute the most beautiful (I am not making this number up) seventeen point turnaround you have ever seen. She pulled up to the exact same pump in exactly the same orientation. I had not moved one inch. “There,” she said. I shook my head.
