Murray Wiseman

10 Words: Transfer my understanding of maintenance to others and measure results.

Detailed response:
I began as a project engineer on large maintenance projects at Alcan. There I recognized significant challenges to maintenance. My feeling at the time was that maintenance was so complex a subject, that, surely searching for some sort of systematic approach would be a worthwhile endeavor. I continued working, learning, and observing at Alcan. Eventually I though I knew enough to actually participate in the management of maintenance. Therefore, I joined Molson Brewery as a maintenance coordinator and subsequently promoted to maintenance superintendent. In this capacity, responsible for 150 trades people, I gained a far deeper respect for the challenges of maintenance and concluded that good intentions alone would be necessary bring it under control. The factors affecting maintenance performance were daunting. They included union relations, training, scheduling, planning, and the complexity of the subject itself in a typical large production context. After six years and considerable study of the maintenance theories of the day, I joined PricewaterhouseCoopers as a principal consultant, focusing on RCM. I took the three-week RCM "boot camp" delivered by John Moubray in the UK. This was a revelation, and I began delivering RCM training and guidance to clients. I learned the intricacies and subtleties of this powerful technique.

However, there was a problem. RCM, when done simply and properly executed, delivers reasonably good initial maintenance policies. These were only a first approximation and based upon the best recollection, opinions, and facts elicited at the time. The RCM derived plan would be placed into the CMMS where it was frozen. The policies were not revisited nor updated with the benefit of subsequent continuing experience.

This was a problem that I needed to set my mind to. Moubray's "RCM in perpetuity" idea was unsatisfactory and never really applied by any of the Aladon members. Slowly my thoughts congealed to the concept of living RCM whereby work orders "instantiate" knowledge records. This facilitates subsequent reliability analysis of the instances (i.e. occurrences) of failure modes. This approach contrasts starkly to a traditional reliance by maintainers on "failure codes" for this purpose.

Pick lists of maintenance failure codes are often difficult to choose from and prone to error. The selection items are often too general or do not adequately fit a given situation. Or, alternatively, long lists of precise codes suffer from "choice overload" resulting in the overuse of the default "Other". Without doubt, effective and accurate lists are the ultimate objective. But deciding what choices to place on such pick lists, I found, is no trivial matter. I realized that some process would be required to facilitate day-to-day recording of useful reliability related information onto the work order. I decided, finally, on an approach that is reasonable, simple, robust and progressive. A forward thinking maintenance manager, Cesar Centeno, at the world's largest integrated coal mine, Cerrejon, saw value in this approach and recently began implementing it.

The living RCM process, I conceived, requires that a significant work order, prior to closure, contain two specific information elements. They are:
1. a reference to the relevant RCM knowledge record, and
2. the life ending event type (usually one of Potential Failure, Functional Failure, or Suspension).

In the living RCM procedure, the maintainer or planner, prior to closing work order, looks up the RCM record covering the current situation. If he finds no appropriate RCM record describing the failure mode or if the RCM record is incomplete, he proposes an update to the knowledge base. The knowledge record is duly updated by a verifier designated to assure knowledge quality control.

I strive to lead a maintenance team in this direction....