Useless Information
is the Worst Use of Your
Maintenance Workforce  

Enrique Mora, Consultant 

I recently visited a plant where Work Orders are doing Nothing for the purpose of Maintenance Improvement!

Don’t take me wrong: Work Order Systems, when properly utilized, are some of the best tools you can have to optimize the results of the Maintenance Team’s efforts.

 

I just visited a very productive, (for their group standards), metal-mechanic plant. The main surprise was to see that there are tons of useless data being reported back by the maintenance technicians. Indeed, the answered orders have in them details of obvious actions that were taken to resolve the problem reported by the customer. Of course all that information is not needed at all. 

Simultaneously a critical part of data is missing:
“The Root Cause of the problem.” 

As Usual: It is all about the Training! 

At the core of this problem is the lack of the appropriate training and motivation that would make these work-orders the valuable resource they are meant to be. 

The late and missed Charles Latino says in one of his articles:  

”Failure occurs on three levels. First are physical root causes. What components are failing? More importantly, why? Second are human errors or inappropriate interventions/operations. Finally, management systems to address chronic failures may be poor or nonexistent. Analyzing management systems may well be the most important activity because it frequently uncovers paradigms that impede a plant’s ability to perform.”  

Indeed, when a technician repairs something the moment is just perfect to do the most important task he can do: retrieve all possible information to proceed to perform the “Root Cause Analysis,” without which, the problem will likely recur. Most of the equipment problems, Charles Latino said that up to 80% of them will keep repeating time after time. More than 240 billion dollars are wasted per year “fixing” those chronic problems and failures, while most of them could be completely avoided by the simple and logic process of analyzing and, (when possible), removing the Root Cause. 

In some cases, this will generate some scheduled corrective maintenance that will solve the problem altogether for good. Maintenance technicians need to make sure, in order to do a professional job, of preventing the recurrence of equipment failures. That is certainly… The Most Important Reason of the Maintenance Profession.