Are Your Bearings Reaching Their L10 Life?

Why is "Are Your Bearings Reaching Their L10 Life?" an important question? Well it is an indicator of something that isn't necessarily discussed, lube failure. If the lubrication fails early, the bearings that are lubed will have a shortened life.

Read the following article: http://www.machinerylubrication.com/article_detail.asp?articleid=967

Consider tracking your L10 Life as a Key Performance Indicator of your lube program.

Leading and Lagging KPI's: Worry or Celebrate?

We all seem to know that we need to use and monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPI)'s, however, it isn't always clear which ones are best and what we are supposed to learn from them. Reliabilityweb.com just recently published an article from Cargill that discusses the importance of understanding what you should measure and why, http://reliabilityweb.com/index.php/articles/measuring_plant_performance_-_the_need_for_metrics_standardization/.

I particularly found the discussion on leading and lagging KPI's important. Identifying leading indicators and monitoring them will guide your organization to successfully achieve the results you hope to achieve when benchmarking the lagging indicators. The goal is to worry about the leading KPI's and celebrate the lagging KPI's.

If you are interested in finding more articles and information on KPI's click here.

Measuring Change

When I attended the EAM2009 conference in Daytona Beach FL, which was put on by reliabilityweb.com, I had the opportunity to attend a presentation on methods of measuring change, in particular organizational change. Since much of the potential success of Asset Management or any other new initiative depends on organizational change, it is important to be able to track and measure the change as it occurs to identify if the Asset Management objectives are taking root and growing.

The article and presentation are great. However, I particularly like the summary graphic from the presentation:



http://reliabilityweb.com/ee-assets/my-uploads/art09/rcm09/army01.jpg. This graphic demonstrates how incorporating a behavior based measurement along with traditional Key Performance Indicators (KPI) will reveal how the organization is moving to truly adopt the required organizational change.

You can find the article here: http://reliabilityweb.com/index.php/articles/measuring_sustainable_change/

Key Performance Indicators

I received a great question from a PNCWA Asset Management newsletter reader, which I think the answer is worth repeating here.

Question: How do you select a good key performance indicator (KPI) and what is a good strategy for implementing it?



Answer: Wow, this is a great topic and I am glad to have an opportunity to provide a few thoughts on developing KPI's. First, I know in the literature there is a group of KPI's, including Preventive to Corrective maintenance ratios, PM backlog, etc...., that many people implement and I recommend for benchmarking purposes. However, when you are attempting to manage or improve on a certain element of your program I recommend taking a bit of a different perspective.



I like to design working level key performance indicators to communicate and bring focus to a particular objective. I would like to demonstrate this with the following graphic that I have used at one of my projects:


http://www.wllcamg.com/downloads/unit_process_risk_matrix.jpg

This graphic shows a table that distributes the existing backlog of work orders by count (132 lower right) across the unit processes (along the left column) and includes a distribution of the work orders within the critical systems (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X85d9ZVjOwQ&feature=related) in each unit process. There are totals for each unit process on the right column and each criticality ranking (5,3,2,1) across the bottom row, with the total in the lower right. I created this table using Microsoft Excel using the Pivot Table function from an export of raw Work Order data taken from the CMMS. (Note: The CMMS includes a complete unit process/functional system hierarchy, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEGE69ie5QE, and Relative Criticality ranking of the systems in User Defined Fields (UDF)).

The objective of the Unit Process Risk Matrix is to weekly present to the maintenance manager a more informative presentation of his backlog of work orders so that he can prioritize the work to reduce risk. Reducing operating risk and focusing resources on a week to week basis is a more effective way to achieve the overall objective of keeping the facility operating at the expected Level of Service, then simply focusing on what the backlog is, or even how the back log is changing from week to week as is typically tracked in the backlog benchmark KPI.

For me the key to KPI's is figuring out a way to present information that presents "actionable" information because data presentation is often an overlooked part of asset management where inspiring action in our audiences is key to our success. In the example above the maintenance manager can quickly see how many "red" work orders he has and in which Unit Process they are in. Another excellent example of a quickly understood presentation of data is this map (http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/minard) which plots Napoleon's route to Moscow in 1812. The line width that plots the route represents the total army census at any point along the route and the impact of what happened to Napoleon's army on that fateful trip leaps out.

Hans Rosling is another expert at presenting complex data to make an "actionable" impact on his audience. Check out the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUwS1uAdUcI . It is about twenty (20) minutes long, but you only really need to watch the first five minutes to get the picture of what he is doing with world population data.

If you would like to play with Hans Rosling's graphing tool you are in luck. Google purchased his software and now makes it available for free online with their spreadsheet tool. Check out an example here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pCQbetd-CptE1ZQeQk8LoNw (Please allow time to download graph action)

Please share with us any valuable KPI's that you develop or have developed because we all could benefit from new ways to present our asset management information.

Training Link - Asset Management Culture with Barry Buchanan

In February 2008, I got a chance to have an interview with Barry Buchanan, of the Pacific Northwest AMUG, to get his perspective on Culture Change and Asset Management. Barry first encountered the principals of Asset Management in 1989 while working with Thames Water (http://www.thameswater.co.uk/) in the UK. Under Margret Thatcher, the water and wastewater utilities across the UK were privatized with specific contractual requirements that drove Asset Management principals for the entire industry. Barry had the opportunity to participate in this dramatic shift, which for Thames, included the integration of 26 regional water companies into a single entity in just 4 years. The organizational cultural change required by this shift in paradigm was significant and Barry had the opportunity to learn from some of the best consultants in the industry. Join me in listening to a few of the lessons he has learned over the years.

"CMMS ..... is a tool to facilitate performance measurement", Barry Buchanan, February 2008.