Mike Sondalini — Thought Leader

Turn ISO 9001 Clauses into Your Business Quality System Specifications.

In 1987 the ISO9000 quality management series was launched; superseding the earlier BS5750 document. It has progressed from its initial product quality focus to its now customer satisfaction focus. During all its life the question of the usefulness of ISO9001 to business growth and performance has dogged it. The greatest fault of ISO9001 is its lack in setting quality performance. It mistakenly asks companies to select their own quality standards to work to. That is its single greatest problem—the lack of quality benchmarks and is the reason why it is common to hear managers call ISO 9001 a waste of time. But if you address ‘quality’ correctly in your ISO 9001 quality management system you can turn your company into a world-class performer within three years.

 It is a mockery to use business performance indicators to manage a company or department. Using the information that shows up on the management dashboards on your screen can wreck your company. Measuring a process does not put you in control of it. A process is totally self-controlled. You always get what the process gives you. Organizational processes work well or do not because of their design.1 A business process that cannot achieve its aims is the wrong design for its purpose.

Your views on why enterprise asset management fails intrigued me. I am currently undertaking a master’s study on “Understanding the Difficulties of Developing an Effective Planned Preventive Maintenance Regime at an underground coal mine”.

My masters is based on finding the reasons why in the mining field the other methods of maintenance methodologies such as RCM, TPM, Six Sigma, etc. do not seem to get embraced by the mining maintenance teams, and there is always a weak attempt to implement them on the part of management.

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.