Overview

The term "Maintenance Excellence" has been around for a long time. Despite that, there is no place in the dictionary where you can look for a consistent meaning. Maintenance Excellence means different things to different people. While I will attempt to provide my definition, it is unlikely that many people will completely agree.

Universal agreement on a definition is not important. What is important is that you know what it means to you. It is also important that you and others working in the same plant or in the same company as you, have a consistent definition. Even more important than a consistent definition is a common vision of what things will look like when you arrive at maintenance excellence.

A number of years ago, I worked in one of the facilities that were part of a well-known U.S. company. To improve performance, this plant worked its way through an exercise called "Future State". The objective of the exercise was to streamline the organization, and while doing that, to install a variety of concepts currently viewed as part of "excellence" initiatives.

As part of the exercise:

• We formed teams

• We used forests of paper

• We talked until our brains ached

• We kept two facilitators employed full time

• We consumed a great amount of time

Despite all the time and effort, we did...