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Reliability Tip:
Stakeholder Involvement – A Basic Ingredient in Driving Maintenance Excellence
While Maintenance & Repair management teams in most facilities are keenly interested in improving maintenance effectiveness, making process improvements in a vacuum normally generates a poor outcome. Even the simplest change in a maintenance process requires buy-in and action from others outside the maintenance department. At the operational level of most plants, maintenance process “stakeholders” (e.g., mechanics, production management) often also have one or more responsibilities for executing a maintenance process.
For example, a food processing plant decides that all work requests need to be approved by a production line manager before being sent to maintenance for planning, and that only a maintenance planner can requisition repair parts. The goal of this process improvement is to reduce non-value-added and redundant work orders from the maintenance backlog – in an effort to improve maintenance scheduling effectiveness. The plant also hopes to reduce the purchasing of unneeded parts.
In this case, the affected stakeholders include maintenance management, production management, MRO materials management, and the IT department. Why can’t this simple process change be effectively handled through email proclamation? Besides the obvious need to build consensus with stakeholders listed above:
- The IT department may need to reconfigure the CMMS’s maintenance work request workflow so that requests are routed directly to the equipment’s production manager/owner.
- Equipment operators need to know the new process.
- Production Managers need to be trained on both the criteria and process for approving work requests.
- Maintenance Planners need to understand their altered responsibilities in the process.
- Mechanics need to know that all work orders must go through a Planner.
- And, MRO Materials Management needs to understand that they can now only accept parts requisitions from Maintenance Planners.
Big maintenance effectiveness gains are often the sum of a series of small, tactical process improvements. It almost always pays to keep in mind that even the simplest process changes may require buy-in and involvement from many people at a facility.
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