November 10, 2005
The Cost of Maintenance Part 6
Restarting a program that has failed can be a daunting task…. If you do not understand the concepts as to why the program failed, in the first place.
Howard W Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP
President
SUCCESS by DESIGN
http://www.motordoc.net
When starting a program from scratch, you must start from the beginning. However, where do you start if a program has failed?
How do you study a system that has failed and has had a negative impact on profit? You simply perform a Root-Cause-Analysis on it. The areas that must be investigated include:
1. What human issues contributed to the failure? (training, attitude, correct selection, etc.)
2. What technology issues contributed to the failure? Was the correct technology selected? Was technology the answer, or was it purchased without a plan?
3. What program issues contributed to the failure?
4. What management issues contributed to the failure?
5. Were the correct systems selected for the maintenance program?
6. Was there continuous improvement? Were findings ignored?
7. More
For each of these, you must identify the ROOT cause, not the feeling – use data. For instance: In a recent project, the analyst decided that he did not trust the expert software with an instrument. Instead, he relied upon his older experience and only reported those issues, ignoring the others. Later, it was discovered that less than 2.9% of the systems failed. In the meantime, there was a high rate of machine failure that, when investigated, turned out to be 20% of the problems identified with the expert software.
In the real-world example, above, the program was going to be abandoned because of the high rate of failed equipment that was PERCEIVED as not being detected by the instrumentation. If the study had not been performed, the root-cause would have been missed, which turns out to have been a management-training issue. Management did not believe in the program and did not support training for the analyst.
Many times, programs fail because management and the worker do not understand the purpose of maintenance, which is to maintain the availability of critical systems functions.
To be continued….
