The 3 Core Functions of a Maintenance Turnaround

Maintenance turnarounds can be a lot of work, but they're even more work if you do them the hard way.

There are 3 clear pieces that need to work well in order to make the turnaround go fast.

1. A roadmap built on what's actually constraining you.

Most plants don't know their maintenance constraints or maintenance goals such that they can communicate them cleanly.

When leading a turnaround, I always recommend that the department aim to "return every machine to standard."

How does one do that? 

Start with OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) machine audits. An audit gives you a parts list, and a parts list tells you where the money has to go to bring the equipment back to standard.

Accept that you need to return equipment to standard.  Machines wear slower, run better, and make better product if they're mechanically tight and everything works.  The lowest cost way to run equipment is to keep it in immaculate condition.

Once you realize you want to maintain equipment to a high standard, then you have to look at your maintenance department and figure out what's really holding you back.

Is it the parts budget? (This is ideally where the constraint should be.)

Tech labor hours? 

Knowledge of what needs to be done?

Machine availability?

I wrote about this last week in my article, Theory of Constraints: Structuring a Maintenance Turnaround. Most shops don't really know what they're short on. 

Next, you have to figure out how much of your budget you can put towards returning machines to standard. 

Then you have to do enough OEM audits (which should give a parts list to buy and an estimate of how long it would take to install those parts) to where you can cleanly split that budget across your machine availability.  Don't blow a whole month's budget on parts for a single machine if it'll take you 6 months to install them.  Buy parts you can immediately install, even if it's across multiple machines.

That is to say, evaluate machine availability and work criticality, and make sure you're able to install the parts you buy so you get a performance gain from them.

2. A stage-gated work order process.

Once you have some idea of how much money you have and what you want to do, you then have to make sure you can do it efficiently.

Each zone or line item from one of those OEM audits will need to be turned into a work order. The work then needs to be planned, the parts ordered, tracked and kitted, and the job assigned, completed and inspected.

If you do this for the full scope of your budget, that could be dozens of work orders that need to be handled each month just for the "return to standard" goal. And that doesn't count your emergency work.

A stage-gated work order process (and the money to do it) is what turns a repair need into a finished work result.

Every job moves through defined gates (scoped, parts identified, kitted, scheduled, completed), so nothing stalls between steps.

The goal is simple: the only thing limiting how much work gets done should be the budget.

If parts are piling up on the kit shelf or planning is getting backed-up, the constraint has moved into your process. That's a problem you can fix.

Establishing a well-functioning maintenance process can be difficult and requires a little finesse.

Failure in any one area will effectively stop the entire process. When one thing stops working, the tendency is for everyone to give up.

I have strategies for getting this process up and running if anyone is struggling with it.  And I'm happy to help.

3. Hand floor duties back to the operators.

Over the years maintenance quietly absorbs tasks that belong to operators. 

However, these tasks are tasks that prevent you from being able to schedule and control tech time effectively.

If you schedule repairs, and your techs get pulled off to do setups, that destroys your ability to navigate the turnaround efforts.

Hand those tasks back to your operators and make them competent at them.  This requires continuous reinforcement on important and perishable tasks at the operator stations and it cannot be done by the technicians.

However, it pays off twice. Your machines run better right away and operators can prevent avoidable problems because they know how to run the machines properly. 

Your techs are then freed up to do the repair work laid out in the roadmap and work order process.

It's the fastest payback in the whole turnaround.

All 3 pieces are needed to rapidly turn around a maintenance shop.

These three tasks depend on each other. A roadmap without a work order process is a wish list. A work order process without techs to work it is just a queue. And techs stuck standing in as operators can't fix anything.

Which of the three is your plant weakest at?