TABLE OF CONTENTS Reliability cannot be driven by the maintenance organization. It must be driven by the operating units and led from the top.
Charles Bailey
Beta reviewed the operating practices at several of its manufacturing plants, and concluded that poor practices in plant operation, process control, and production planning were often at the root of poor plant reliability and uptime performance, resulting in increased operating and maintenance costs, poor product quality, and poor delivery performance, among other things. Indeed, a preliminary analysis indicated that while maintenance costs were well above world-class, over half of these costs were being driven by poor process control and operational practices. Maintenance had historically been "blamed" for equipment downtime and high maintenance costs, but on closer review, most of the maintenance costs were the result of poor operational practices. The conclusion was reached that Beta had to have much better consistency of process, greater precision in plant control, and much better operator training and expertise to eliminate or minimize the root cause of many problems.
At Beta's Wayland plant, an expert had been called in to help reduce maintenance downtime. It seemed that the plant was having numerous equipment failures, resulting in lots of downtime, lost production, and out-of-pocket costs. In the course of the review, an inquiry was made as to key process control parameters, at which time the process engineer brought forth several graphs. In reviewing these graphs, it was determined that the plant should be...
