The Proactive Work Flow Model

Most reactive organizations find themselves performing the majority of their work unplanned and forced to break schedules to accommodate emergencies. In this situation, PMs and PdMs typically get put off or cancelled to allow extra resources to perform the urgent work that has taken priority.

Definition of Insanity: Continuing to do the same thing while expecting different results.

Typically, a reactive organization will perform 80% of their work flow in a reactive state while less than 20% of their total work flow is planned and scheduled. These organizations do not put a high priority on the PM and PdM activities and typically use them for fill in work while the ever important crisis situation is brewing. These same organizations struggle with identifying enough work in a backlog to keep the planners busy. So, the planners become expediters or ad hoc crew leaders for emergency work. Inevitably, the cycle continues. Because of this, PM and PdM activities start to get a negative image and become less important because of the non-value added perception due to the obvious amount of requested and emergency work that continues to pile up. The logical decision becomes “If everything is breaking, PdM must not work here”. Since the breakdown cycle continues to flourish, PMs are continually added to the system to eliminate or identify the original defects. (See Definition of Insanity).

In the Proactive Work Flow Model, the PMs and PdMs are generated based on probable failure modes in your assets. The emphasis is placed on early detection and elimination of defects. To do this effectively and collaboratively throughout the entire organization, Planning and Scheduling is the key to success. In a sense, the PM and PdM program simply provides managers, engineers, and planners with a backlog of work to be performed. This information, along with a proper criticality ranking, will prescribe what work to do and when.  It is important to stress the importance of early detection. We must understand our work process and durations needed to effectively create job plans, secure spare parts and job kits, obtain work permits, and schedule repairs with management and operations.

Some organizations tend to utilize their PM/PdM program to optimize their run-to-failure strategy. Have you ever asked, “How long until it fails?”, or thought that you may get another week out of a bearing if you monitored it more closely? Although there are situations that may warrant this logic, typically the economics associated with this strategy have negative returns when compared to effectively planning, scheduling, and eliminating the defect.

As illustrated in the Proactive Work Flow Model, continuous improvement and refinement are critical to long term, continuing success. In our many years of experience with interviewing and working with craft personnel, we have found it necessary to provide feedback to the craft in regards to quality of work performed. Likewise, the craft can provide critical defect information back to the PM/PdM analyst to refine alarm and collection specifications. Similarly, information should flow back to planners to continuously update job plans.

To develop confidence and accuracy within the PM/PdM databases and the detailed job plans, an accurate asset list with detailed attributes must be present. Without this information, the overall scope of the maintenance activities cannot be identified. How many times have you attempted to create a work order within your CMMS to find an asset does not exist? How many PMs are in your system directed toward assets that have been eliminated? How many of those PMs have labor hours directed toward them and have been “signed off”?

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