 Silver mettle
A Reynolds Metals maintenance department that once languished in a reactive mode spins off a program based on preventive, predictive and proactive practices. Welcome to the world of Reliability-Based Maintenance.
by Paul V. Arnold
Down the road from Richmond, Va., just a few miles off Interstate 64, you'll find it: Mechanicsville.
It's a quaint town (population 10,000) with a name that conjures images of blue-collar bliss -- a place where mechanics, and other industrial craftsmen, are king.
Beyond the name, though, Mechanicsville is just another small town in eastern Virginia.
Many of that area's maintenance professionals did feel that a true "Mechanicsville" existed. For years, up until the mid-1980s, they swore it was located in Richmond, at the 517,000-square-foot home of Reynolds Metals Company.
Reynolds, the well-known maker of alumimum foil products such as Reynolds Wrap, paid maintenance personnel at levels that rivaled, or exceeded, the region's other manufacturing giants (Philip Morris, Du Pont and AlliedSignal).
Employees received lucrative benefit and vacation packages.
And the maintenance department's reactive, wait-until-it-breaks posture led to extended periods of inactivity.
"If there was nothing to do, no fires to fight, the maintenance crew was given busy work to fill out its day," says Mark Parrish, a machinist at that time.
Reynolds maintenance was the envy of the Richmond area.
But as the small neighboring town with the idyllic name shows, there is a difference between paradise and reality.
Reality hit Reynolds employees, especially those in maintenance, in the mid-'80s.
"The aluminum industry took a real beating," says Parrish. "There were layoffs, cutbacks, downsizing. The company found huge amounts of waste in its facilities. Maintenance was a big target."
Some Richmond maintenance workers got scared or discouraged and left the company. Others stayed and drew plans for a new department based on progressive thought, technology and bottom-line results.
The seeds for Reliability-Based Maintenance were planted.
A captive audience
Today, the Reynolds plant's maintenance crew is a hot commodity. That will happen when you increase overall uptime 30 percent, reduce reactive work orders 40 percent and show documented cost savings in the past six years of more than $2 million.
Parrish, the former hourly worker, is now the maintenance manager and directs 125 employees.
He regularly gives presentations on his department's transformation to visitors from national award programs, maintenance crews from other Reynolds facilities and other companies, executives from Reynolds customers, and delegates at national association conventions.
Down the hall from his office is a display case housing plaques and accreditations. For the past three years, a maintenance training firm has named the department's Reliability-Based Maintenance (RBM) program one of the nation's best.
Reynolds maintenance is once again the envy of craftsmen in the Richmond area. But this time, it's for different reasons.
To understand the present, you have to investigate the past.
Stark realizations
"In the early 1980s, and well before that, we thought we were doing good maintenance," says Parrish, who started at the plant in 1981. "We had some very good people running things. We did a lot of reactive work, but that was accepted practice.
"The supervisor walked the floor in the morning, found out what needed to get done or fixed, and the work day started from there. Work orders weren't tracked. All the information was kept in a little black book in the supervisor's pocket. It was done that way for 30 years. We thought we were pretty good."
The problem? Maintenance isolated itself from others, and reality.
"We used to have five or six Reynolds plants in the area, but we never talked," says Parrish. "If someone was doing fantastic things, we'd never know."
When the financial crunch hit in the mid-1980s, the plant's maintenance department was forced to address its inefficiencies.
"It wasn't until we started working with outside contractors in the late '80s that we realized the reactive, unhealthy mode we were in (60 percent reactive work, 50 percent uptime)," says Parrish. "We also found out what people like AlliedSignal and Du Pont were doing and we were like, 'My gosh, they're light years ahead of us.'"
Change would not be quick or painless.
Humble beginnings
The road to reform began in 1988 with the formation of a planning and scheduling department.
"In the first year or two, it was difficult to stay on schedule," says Roy White, who at the time was a maintenance area supervisor. "We had a hard time convincing production of its importance. They were slow to see the benefits of shutting down a machine when we were ready vs. waiting for it to break."
In the early 1990s, the department began to dabble in preventive and predictive maintenance.
Mechanics drew oil samples from machinery and sent them to an outside laboratory for analysis. Most of the time, though, the information from the lab was filed and never saw the light of day.
Consultants occasionally conducted vibration analysis on equipment and infrared thermography on transformers and switch-gear. Some of that work was done simply for insurance purposes.
The foundation for lasting change wasn't laid on the plant floor. Instead, it was the maintenance manager's office in 1993.
Mark Diamond, the manager at that time, dished out assignments one day to his area supervisors. Most received tasks that were small in scope.
"I was handed the preventive (oil analysis) and predictive maintenance programs," says Parrish, who was overseeing efforts in the Reynolds Wrap building.
Parrish didn't have a background in these maintenance techniques. And he wasn't given a budget, personnel or tools. He was simply asked to build the programs.
A one-man crusade
Parrish didn't pout over the assignment. He opened his mind and learned from the department's past mistakes.
"I went to a couple of seminars and started looking around the industry. I talked with a ton of people. I hooked up with PM (preventive maintenance) and PdM (predictive maintenance) experts. I attended Vibration Institute meetings," he says. "I got excited."
And he bought the department's first predictive maintenance tool -- an $800, pen-sized instrument that took vibration readings.
"I took it to the Reynolds Wrap building and got some craftspeople to play around with it," he says.
It raised eyebrows and interest.
Confrontation, then support
While some hourly workers bought into the benefits of PM and PdM, others felt differently. The turning point was 1994. That year, Parrish became planning manager.
"Before, the program was just 'out there,'" he says. "Now, PM and PdM was brought under the planning group. It became its own entity."
With his boss' approval, Parrish nabbed his first crew member. He turned machinist/union member Lee Salisbury into a full-time predictive maintenance technician. Salisbury was picked for his skills, enthusiasm and hard shell.
Still deemed an hourly worker, Salisbury received an office next to those of salary employees. This created an extremely delicate situation as the union raised job classification and seniority issues.
"There was a lot of misunderstanding of what was being done and what wasn't," Salisbury says. "The union body thought we shouldn't be doing this, that this was a salary person's job. I saw it as an opportunity to learn."
The PM/PdM program hinged on Salisbury's staying power.
"Lee took a lot of heat," Parrish says. "If he would have reacted, it would have created a feud."
Salisbury endured months of whispers and confrontations. During that time, Parrish worked closely with union representatives.
"Talking, and re-emphasizing how important these jobs would be, led to full support," he says.
By the end of the year, Parrish's staff grew to three and the tool kit included infrared thermography and laser alignment equipment.
"We had no written goals at that time," Parrish admits. "We focused on the Reynolds Wrap building, trying to survive and gain credibility."
Bearing fruit
Credibility arrived in early 1996 after vibration and oil analysis detected abnormalities on a mill's main drive gearbox. During a shutdown, the gearbox was inspected, leading to a surprising find.
"The technician reached in and grabbed a piece of a bearing," says Parrish. "It was a 27-inch piece of bearing cage flapping back and forth between the gear mesh, getting ready to get sucked in. Without vibration and oil analysis, we wouldn't have been led to it."
A representative from the gearbox manufacturer explained that the piece would have destroyed the box's entire drive train had it gone through.
Parrish and crew spent a month on a management report showing that the find and repair saved the company more than $350,000.
When the plant manager heard the dollar figure, he questioned its
validity. Parrish arrived with documentation in hand. The figures were justified, not inflated.
"That was enough to get the plant's confidence. Now when we put out a number, it really doesn't get questioned," says Parrish.
As buy-in increased, so did the resources. In the next 12 months, the growing team used them to find $1 million worth of "low-hanging fruit." Included was a $134,000 savings by approaching oil analysis as a predictive function instead of preventive.
"Preventive maintenance told us to change a machine's oil every 60 days, regardless of oil condition," says Parrish. "Some of our synthetic oil costs $12 a gallon. It gets expensive changing a 600-gallon unit every 60 days. And the oil, much of the time, is good. You're tossing good oil.
"(Lubrication engineer) Ed Myers got us using the oil analysis info. We don't change the oil until our oil report says so. Some of these systems now go a year, two years between changes."
RBM is born
In 1997, the evolution (or revolution) was complete. Parrish was promoted to maintenance manager and gave his pet project prime-time status. He named White planning manager and Salisbury predictive maintenance manager.
"Up to that point, we moved slowly, steadily in the right direction," he says. "This got us pushing faster. We truly became a Reliability-Based Maintenance (RBM) organization."
RBM takes preventive and predictive maintenance principles and technologies and expands them into the arena of proactive maintenance.
Proactive maintenance principles can involve prescribing specifications on new equipment, vendor parts, precision overhauls and rebuilds. It also determines cause of failure through root cause failure analysis.
As in the past, Parrish didn't create a separate budget for non-traditional maintenance tools, labor and projects.
"It all comes out of the overall maintenance budget," he says. "I make the best use of my budget. Is it more important for me to spend the money on reactive things or proactive things?"
Since 1997, the RBM team has grown to 24 members. Twelve test, monitor and diagnose plant equipment. Another 12 are part of a new Corrective-Based Maintenance team that attacks work orders generated by PM, PdM or proactive projects.
"We needed a way to get all the finds corrected," Parrish says. "If you don't address the problems, they slip through the cracks."
Few things currently slip through. Machinery uptime is 80 percent, a stellar mark for an aluminum rolling and converting plant housing 30-, 40- and 50-year-old mills. Fewer than one in five tasks is reactive.
Cost avoidance dollars have dropped, but that's common in a mature program.
"When the low-hanging fruit is gone and your equipment is in good shape, you might take $100,000 in annual savings instead of $1 million," he says. "If your program is tied to cost savings, you have problems. We've never really focused on the dollar figures. They've been there, but we've chosen uptime and machine reliability as indicators of our success."
Reality and beyond
Stability and productivity have advanced the program's goals beyond simple survival. Today, Parrish sees RBM as the ingredient to the department achieving "world class" status.
"Right now, we have pockets of excellence," he says. "We're moving toward world class. And, RBM is established here. It will endure."
Parrish's goals for the near future include shifting the RBM team's
representation in maintenance from 20 percent to 50 percent (60 members devoted to RBM activities), increasing uptime beyond 90 percent and increasing RBM tool monitoring to all 3,000 pieces of plant equipment.
If that sounds Utopian, a little like "Mechanicsville," listen up.
Says Salisbury: "We're making believers out of a lot of people."
This article appeared in the June/July 2000 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright, 2000.
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