Fix Forever or Forever Fix Right

There is nothing wrong with a repair shop if you are a service center trying to make a profit. However, maintenance organizations that are reliability-focused, should be trying to reduce work.

The primary focus of defect management is to eliminate work – whereas the traditionalists try to optimize it.    // Winston Ledet

Winston refers to defects as “Anything that erodes value, reduces production, compromises HSE (health, safety, and environment), or creates waste.” A defect can lay hidden from view and may not become apparent until it causes a failure. Workers may know about it and walk by it every day, thinking that this is insignificant and not worth correcting.

It is quite possible that as repairs are made, new defects will be introduced. In any case, there are a lot of defects. The concern is around the human factors at 84%. So, who in the organization is focusing on trying to remove these defects?

There are Different Types of Defect Elimination Programs

The preferred strategy is to have a cross-functional defect elimination team. This group dedicates a portion of their time each week to defect elimination. Sometimes the defect can be corrected straight away and other times not. For the latter, a defect record is created. There are 3 possible paths forward:

Note that maintenance staff must account for their time and therefore need either a specific work order or blanket.

Purpose of the Shadow Network

A defect elimination team may take the form of a "shadow network". This is an inter-connected group with a common purpose. They find time to help solve problems and eliminate defects even when there is no recognition for doing so.

Defect Elimination Team Members Support a Culture of Reliability

In a perfect world, there are reliability leaders throughout the organization. That said, some job positions make reliability a focal point, such as the reliability team and defect elimination team members. Other job titles may mention reliability-based maintenance as a bullet point. Either way, those organizations that have a shadow network that takes initiative on their own, even without being requested to do so, will be a step ahead of their competitors.

So, who is Focusing on Trying to Remove Defects?

Tip: Begin focus on O&M staff

Most maintenance activity consists of preventive maintenance, condition monitoring, and basic repair work. When this work is completed in the CMMS, this is where feedback from anyone updating work orders can help. Verbal feedback is okay, but actionable data is better. Examples of feedback are as follows:

The O&M technicians who provide feedback may not have time to correct the problem but at least they are reporting the problem.

Assuming the CMMS can be configured, the work order completion screen could be amended to capture feedback such as operability issues, asset condition, PM frequency incorrect, PM strategy incorrect, maintainability issues, design flaws, hazardous conditions not in the work plan, ergonomics, and energy efficiency. If any of the above are checked, then an additional explanation could be provided. Electronic routing could be established to send this feedback to the appropriate position.

More importantly, enhanced failure coding could be captured which would be most helpful to the reliability team. The CMMS work order screen could be configured to capture a true failure mode (failed component, component problem, and cause code). The real value is in the cause code. The maintenance technician knows what component he repaired/replaced. The technician (or supervisor) could enter the component problem code. A maintenance/reliability engineer could enter the cause code. Note: the 3-part failure mode is better explained in my book, Failure Modes to Failure Codes.

Cause-1 [in yellow] is aging, wear-and-tear, power surge, housekeeping issue, environmental issue, force-majeure cause, or something else, i.e., “human factor”. Cause-2 [in green] are all human factors. If it appears that cause-2 is workmanship, then cause-3 [in grey] expands on the cause.

This level of detail, when combined with the reliability team running a bad actor report, will have an immediate effect on reducing defects in the system.

Systemic Issues

If the event that occurred was a recurring issue, the reliability team may elect to dive deeper. Additional entries can be made to store the following:

Is it time to get serious about defect elimination? You might start by creating a shadow network.