Last week Gerard Wood and Alfredo Pérez presented in front of a group of maintenance and supply professionals from the mining industry in Peru. The Vantaz team in Peru organised the breakfast discussion.
The topic of conversation was simplifying maintenance processes and how to effectively implement a maintenance process within a large team without creating tonnes of documents. Key to this is team alignment and compliance, as it is the entire teams’ responsibility to ensure they hold each other mutually accountable to the agreed standards and outputs from the maintenance processes.
Gerard and Alfredo shared examples of working agreements (as seen below) – agreed expectations of the required outcomes from others in the team and the alignment on some critical process steps. This ensures the entire team understands what their role is, how it works in the big picture and reinforces mutual accountability.
Once a strong team commitment to the processes has been formed and there is a mechanism for mutual accountability, the next step is to build an improvement culture. This starts with the desire and determination to improve. If people want to do something, they find ways to make it happen, if they don’t, they find excuses for why it cannot happen.
Key to successfully implementing working agreements and a continuous improvement culture are daily and weekly routines that are performed with the correct quality standards. These enable discipline and allow productive habits to form through repeating the same processes but also form a base from which to improve.
The discussion also went into the lifecycle costs of equipment and how the culture discussed above sets a platform for a business to control equipment lifecycle costs. Without the core maintenance culture and team ownership of equipment conditions, the lifecycle costs will not be in control.
