Improving Operational Effectiveness

We have found that 60% of all maintenance costs are caused by 8% of your asset operators. If you have 100 operators and are spending $1,000,000 in direct maintenance cost per period of production then eight operators are directly responsible for $600,000 of maintenance costs.

Some, but not the majority, of these unnecessary or premature costs are operator abuse. Most are a lack of understanding of the operating limits of the machine and the safety and monetary consequences of continued operation to breakdown or destruction. We prefer to call these expensive events Operationally Induced Events (OIE).

If your company is working on a 10% net profit on sales, then these OIEs are consuming the profits from $10 million in sales to pay for the maintenance effort to keep the production assets operating.

Each OIE not only carries the burden of premature maintenance costs but a significant penalty in asset down-time, product manufactured out of specification, lost sales, and safety issues.

We know you cannot shut down to train all operators when an OIE happens but we offer a maintenance management program that can help you to identify each and every OIE that is detected by your maintenance effort, notify your operations managers, and train each identified operator as needed to prevent the expensive and unsafe OIE from happening again.

We can create specific mechanical awareness training presentations that can be constantly presented to your operators to remind them of the consequences of exceeding the operating limits of their assets.

Of the 8% of your operators that are causing 60% of your operational disruptions due to maintenance, 4% do not know they are damaging the asset and the other 4% don't care. Until you identify these workers and train the problems out of the system, they will break your equipment faster than maintenance can repair them and operational schedules and safety records will suffer.

We can install for you a system that lets the maintenance department track OIEs and report them back to your operations managers for targeted mechanical and procedure training.

If an operator does not recognize a pending failure then each failure is a surprise and every surprise is a potential accident. The information can also be shared with the safety department to allow your maintenance department to become a significant generator of near-miss safety events. Our Operationally Induced Event (OIE) Capture Program is easily installed without disrupting operations and can be functional in a week. If you should care to know more about how this program can change your operational efficiency, we are at your service.

Sincerely,

David Geaslin