A Roadmap for Equipment Health Scoring Across Multiple Plants

All operations executives know the dreaded call. “Hey, this is Jane, the plant manager from Tennessee, and our filler just crashed hard.”

During my operations career, equipment breakdowns inevitably happened just before a holiday or important customer sales period that the local teams had been preparing for months to meet. I dreaded what came next—the calls to the other plants forcing them now to work overtime to support their downed sister operation. Then came the emotional customer calls.

In this environment, I far too often found myself in a battle royal at the budget table to get what we needed to maintain or replace equipment across locations.

My most complex battle of all involved a rollup of three separate operating companies in which past history of equipment, technical expertise and preventative maintenance programs were limited, unknown or not completely understood. I literally had a chief financial officer tell me that I did not make enough of a case for the capital I was requesting—to which I responded, “What are you missing here? This is equipment maintenance. If we don’t invest, we risk going down with all the customer and financial implications that come with it.”

Committed to building a more continuous-improvement approach to managing equipment, our team got to work.

The following is a case study of our comprehensive equipment tracking and scoring system that created a robust “health score.” This roadmap successfully proceduralized the capex expenditure process for all parties by providing deep support evidence of risks across plants.

Like most manufacturing executives, you get a feel for your equipment train across the business over time and make decisions based on that knowledge. This process, once fully in place, helped me sleep at night while having a powerful tool to communicate across the budget table and out to our board.

Steps in the Program Creation Process

1. Team charter: Meeting with top operational and technical leaders, we agreed on a problem statement and listed out missing elements and data needed that day. Using the lean/Six Sigma DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control) as a framework for the program , we drafted out the mission, objectives, deliverables and timelines for a project team to accomplish. We agreed on an overall champion and flanked him with a top Black Belt to facilitate sessions, track progress and ensure the project progressed. Adjunct team resources were defined at the local expert level and corporate engineering resources. We set a target of three months to use the outputs for my next annual budget session.

Key objectives/deliverables of the project:

• Must be a comprehensive, measurable process 
• Scores must consider impact to the business due to downtime
• Ranking tiered worst to best with outline level of failure risk (FMEA)
• Worst-ranked to include rebuild/replacement cost and suggested schedules
• Use basic continuous improvement toolkit (DMAIC, brainstorm, root cause, process capability, reliability, MFMEA (machinery failure mode and effects analysis), etc. https://quality-one.com/mfmea/  

2. Kickoff: Executive team conducted the first meeting, which included plant managers and maintenance managers. After a quick centering exercise to “level set” everyone on the goal and importance of the project, we reviewed deliverables. After a quick Q&A to address any doubts, we then handed off to the project champion to outline project tasks and define the “how” in detail.

Topics / Agenda (The How)

Assessment criteria

• Current asset condition
• Local preventative maintenance program efficiency
• Parts availability (investment $$)
• Downtime / scrap trends (control charts as available)
• Rebuild history
• Estimated downtime should it fail
• Cost/customer impact to the business
• Scope of equipment train to assess (vital component parent-child relationships)

Plant-level assessment process

• Who’s involved, what’s the process, when is the first assessment?
• Beta test plant identified for auditing development /assessment/editing
• Buddy teams defined: Group plant maintenance teams provide assistance and collaborate with each other
• Resource needs: Are the equipment manufacturers (OEMs) or additional help required?
• Timeline and schedule with Black Belt on site

Beta plant schedule

• Identify beta plant for first audit and assessment to develop playbook
• Identify champion, BB and technical players to review first-round assessment on site
• Assess and adjust, edit auditing process (deeper dive needed?)
• Special resource allocations (for plants needing additional assistance)
• Develop network timeline for first pass of auditing (parent/child major components)

Engine/facility room components like compressors were assigned to OEMs. Major electrical components like switch gears were handled by local commercial electrical contractors.

3. Beta work session and trial audit

A core group led by the project team leaders met with agreed-upon maintenance managers and corporate tech/engineering team members for a weeklong work session. The session objective was to first draft a step-by-step equipment-audit process.

After trialing the first major equipment set, the group drafted out the scoring process using FMEA (Failure Mode Effects Analysis) framework. A report-out was conducted with the executive team at the end of this event to share learnings and findings.

4. First phase network audits

We conducted a system-wide Zoom meeting with plant/maintenance managers to present the beta plant findings and mythology with a formalized step-by-step process to follow. The beta team was used to coach other locations. A timeline was agreed for the whole network to conduct first draft audits.

5. Rollup/analysis/summary

While this was happening, our finance team created a database to house all data. This included dashboards and queries by location, equipment set and scores to compare the network across operations. Our project and finance team collaborated on rolling up findings and cost estimates for repairs/rebuilds or capital replacement as needed along with ROI (return on investment) on performance. This included an executive summary and report.

Results

This process was a game-changer. We identified and headed off several large-scale failure events. We obtained an accurate technical view of the condition of all our equipment that created a baseline and roadmap. The scoring mythology took much of the emotion out of the equipment expenditures process and helped to improve operating costs associated with downtime, scrap and waste.

All of this made my life easier. This program was so successful, it became a best practice across businesses.