Mike Sondalini — Thought Leader

OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE IS A RESULT 

Operational Excellence requires a business system-of-reliability. Reliability is the chance of success, so a company built as a ‘system-of-reliability’ maximizes its operating profits and production success. The three requirements needed to create a system-of-reliability for Operational Excellence are: 

1. A defect eliminating work quality assurance system where your processes are robust and anti-fragile to disruption, and insure right-first-time results. Only if processes are built to go right every time; are anti-fragile to error; and proactively prevent causes of problems, can you reach Operational Excellence. 

2. Business-wide process innovation focused on optimizing for the highest productivity, least cost, and right quality output. Then you install the next generation of solutions for ever better productivity. 

3. Holistic, lifecycle physical asset management for stable, reliable operation with outstanding availability, highest utilization and most sustainable throughput. 

You do three phases to reach Operational Excellence the Plant Wellness Way: Design your system-of-reliability – Teach your system-of-reliability – Build your system-of-reliability. First, design a business that can be the best. Second, teach your leaders how to do the right things, rightly. Third, apply and do the right behaviours for success. 

Every physical asset has a lifecycle starting at conception through to its eventual disposal and site remediation. In each phase of the lifecycle errors can occur that cause defects within the asset. In operations with hundreds of assets there easily can be tens-of-thousands of defects. Each defect is a risk that eventually contributes to breakdowns, losses, wastes, safety incidents during operation, and shortens the asset’s service lifetime. Eliminating thousands of defects and risks forever is what Plant Wellness Way EAM does for its users

 An endless Dilemma confronts every business. It is how to ensure that the activities we undertake will always produce the intended results. 

Explosions, workplace deaths, harmful accidents, physical injuries, damaged goods, scrapped jobs, repeat work, manufacturing errors, operating mistakes, bad repairs, misunderstanding, wrong decisions, supplier miscommunication and poor delivery performance are all examples of the many unwanted troubles and problems caused by the Dilemma. Its impacts and effects have been written about for more than 6,000 years of recorded human history. 

The Dilemma’s prevalence throughout the world indicates that human beings are a major contributor. A second major factor is business design: how your processes are configured and operate determines your degree of success in addressing the Dilemma. A third big cause is our training and education processes which have transferred the Dilemma all through businesses and across cultures for over 60 centuries. To stop the Dilemma affecting your company you can use what we have learnt about the universe, people and business processes during the last 100 years. 

 Value Driven Maintenance is a financial modelling method to pick maintenance process improvements. Used alone VDM gives you a “starry-eyed” view of maintenance savings. Once you combine VDM with Plant Wellness Way system-of-reliability analysis you get practical solutions.

 This white paper will teach you how to solve your plant and equipment reliability problems and improve your current plant and equipment reliability up to magnificent performance. 

Since the mid-1980’s we have known exactly how to guarantee incredible equipment reliability. Failure-free machinery and equipment is totally achievable (in fact it is remarkably straightforward to do). We have all the answer—we know all the science; we know all the engineering; all the necessary information is readily available. The research has long been completed. The correct solutions for magnificent reliability are practical and quite doable. The problem that remains, is that though we know exactly what needs to be done to get magnificently reliable machines, we cannot get companies to do it right. The limitation to achieving magnificent reliability is not technical. The limitation now seems to be organisational, cultural, and human factors related.