Rally ’round reliability

At Cargill, reliability is more than a maintenance function. It’s an overarching approach to plant, business and personal growth.

by Paul V. Arnold

This is a story about equipment reliability. If you work in the plant maintenance department, that sentence caught your attention. If you don’t work in maintenance — you’re in plant management, production, operations, procurement, etc. — did you assume this story wasn’t for you? Well, it is.

Over the past decade, the word “reliability” has become synonymous in industrial facilities with the word “maintenance.”

A growing number of plants refer to their maintenance mechanics as “reliability technicians” and inject reliability into the titles of their maintenance managers. The nation’s largest professional organization for maintenance leaders, the Society for Maintenance & Reliability Professionals, was founded in 1992 and now boasts more than 2,000 members. At its 2004 conference, approximately 15 percent of attendees had reliability in their title.

The blurring of these words is indeed tied to a strategic shift in industry from the reactive care and maintenance of production machinery (a way to maintain the status quo) to more proactive and progressive methods (seeking mechanical reliability and predictability).

But when dictionaries define maintenance as the upkeep of property or equipment, and reliability as the extent to which an experiment, test or measuring procedure yields the same results on repeated trials, does the idea of “reliability equals maintenance” shortchange your plant? Are the results, repeatability, robustness and reliability of your plant-floor capital assets simply a function of the maintenance department?

“That’s so far from the truth it’s not even funny,” says Tom Katalinich, who manages a Cargill soybean processing plant in Sioux City, Iowa. “If you think you’re going to do reliability solely out of the maintenance department, you’re off track. Upper-level managers and people from all disciplines have to get in on it at the front end and make it part of the business plan. You need to be hands on. Cargill understands equipment reliability impacts the customer and the entire business. It’s everyone’s responsibility.”

Reboot and revamp
Cargill, America’s largest private corporation and one of its most successful (2004 sales of nearly $63 billion), has sharpened and broadened its focus on reliability over the past 10 years.

In 1995, it created a corporate-led Maintenance and Reliability Center of Excellence. Back then, though, the COE’s main push was the implementation of a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software product.

“After a few years of wandering through the wilderness, we found that the focus was wrong,” says Tim Goshert, who today heads the COE and serves as the company’s worldwide reliability and maintenance manager. “Software is only a tool. You need to change your practices and procedures. No process equals no payback.”

The COE’s role, influence and importance grew with the help and support of senior corporate leaders such as Ron Christenson, Cargill’s chief technology officer and executive vice president for worldwide operations.

“Ron started us down the path of getting a group of ‘experts’ together to oversee maintenance and reliability,” says Goshert.

In 1998, a steering committee for the center was assembled. Instead of going vertical, with maintenance leaders focused purely on maintenance issues, the 11-member committee is cross-functional and views reliability in a larger sense.

“We concluded that if we just focus on the maintenance side of the business, we would miss the rest of the organization,” says committee member Rick Baldridge, the reliability functional leader for Cargill’s grain and oilseeds processing division. “We needed one common reliability vision — one vision that involved all professional disciplines.”

That vision, says Baldridge, involves “early detection and elimination of defects, regardless of where they are coming from — conceptual design, procurement, installation, equipment operation, equipment maintenance, wherever.” Tied closely to that are the concepts of productivity and availability.

“The goal is to allow our operating facilities to produce product for customers whenever they want it, however they want it,” says Goshert. “To do that, you must have reliable plants. To do that, you must have healthy assets, facilities, equipment and processes.”

As a supplement to the overarching committee, the Cargill COE spun off steering committees for each of the processing technologies. For example, the oilseeds committee, led by Baldridge, includes six maintenance managers, three plant managers and a regional business manager. The group sets procedures and strategies for equipment reliability within the business unit and examines areas of opportunity.

“It’s very important to me,” says Katalinich, a committee member. “The biggest thing I do is provide 20 years of experience and comment from my position as plant manager on how I see things and how the processes fit into my business.”

Baldridge says the committee’s makeup provides “significant advantages” over an all-maintenance unit.

“(Members) now speak the language of their functional area and the language of maintenance and reliability,” he says. “They can translate what we are doing from a reliability perspective to their professional disciplines.”

Reading, writing and RCM
Cargill’s reliability strategy is in the form of lean manufacturing tools such as Reliability-Centered Maintenance (also known as Reliability-Centered Manufacturing). The RCM approach involves closely examining machinery and processes and then identifying the potential risks, failure modes and solutions to enhanced reliability, thus impacting productivity, availability, agility, repeatability and profitability. Representatives from maintenance, engineering, production, purchasing, the tool crib and other areas can serve as members of an RCM team.

“You need input from all sides,” says Katalinich.

RCM is part of the curriculum of a reliability workshop taught by Goshert and Baldridge at Cargill sites around the globe. The duo has trained more than 2,300 employees since 2000, including 500 last year.

“When we started, attendees were primarily maintenance practitioners,” says Baldridge. “Now, two-thirds are in jobs other than maintenance.”

While the workshops draw key plant leaders, the reliability vision and model is disseminated to the masses through several mediums.

Awareness sessions are “town hall meetings” that give employees at each plant the opportunity to learn and ask questions.

The Reliability Exercise is a board game created and customized for Cargill by Sim Learning. Players representing all plant functions — “from the janitor to the plant manager,” says Goshert — get to see how everyone’s role contributes to the success of reliability.

Also, an area on Cargill’s company intranet site houses a wealth of information (workshop schedules, articles, news, reading lists) on reliability, as well as letters of support from top corporate leaders.

‘Yardstick’ of excellence
If Cargill had limited the initiative to steering committees, workshops and visibility opportunities, the effort still would be fairly unique and praiseworthy. The company, though, went much further by maximizing its involvement with SMRP.

“We wanted to develop and horizontally leverage best practices — not only across our own business unit, but across Cargill,” says Baldridge. “The fastest way to accelerate that is through skills enhancement. If we don’t know what we don’t know, it’s pretty hard to not only develop but execute those processes.”

For individual Cargill employees, that translates to: The more you know, the more you grow.

“Cargill has a history of rewarding successful employees,” says Goshert.

For the company as a whole, it translates as follows: A standardized training regimen (or bar of excellence) could shorten the knowledge and skills gaps between key personnel at all plants and allow for easier transfer of best practices and improvement ideas.

The company played an active role as SMRP explored the development of a certification examination for maintenance and reliability professionals in the late 1990s. Cargill’s Charlie Fast, Matt Meyer and Goshert did early survey and development work. The company also became a sustaining member of the SMRP Certifying Organization (SMRPCO), the group that formalized the certification process and created the Certified Maintenance & Reliability Professional (CMRP) test.

Meyer and Goshert became SMRPCO board members, and a handful of Cargill COE steering committee members took the initial beta exam in fall 2000.

Cargill embraced the CMRP because the body of knowledge matched the company’s vision for reliability and its need to develop well-rounded, 21st-century plant decision-makers.

“Maintenance and reliability professionals need to be balanced,” says Goshert. “They need to understand business and speak the language of business, which is money. To get anything done in business, they have to understand how to lead and influence people. They have to understand the manufacturing processes that surround them. They also must understand equipment reliability and work management.”

To meet those needs, the CMRP exam encompasses five key areas: business and management (24.3 percent), manufacturing process reliability (23), people skills (20.3), work management (16.2) and equipment reliability (16.2).

“This is now the standard,” says Goshert. “This is the yardstick.”

Getting results
Goshert and Baldridge enthusiastically promote the CMRP to any and all Cargill employees.

“We strongly encourage managers and non-managers to take the exam,” says Baldridge. “It’s not a mandate. We want people to educate themselves and decide for themselves what they want to do in the future.”

Adds Goshert, “If you’re a craftsperson and wish to become a planner or are a planner and wish to be a maintenance supervisor, we’ll provide the tools for you. One way to get there is through passing the CMRP exam.”

Cargill pays all training, test and travel fees for an employee to take the exam.

SMRP data shows Cargill has had more people take and pass the exam than any other company in the world. From October 2001 (when the first official CMRP exam was offered) to the end of 2004, 233 employees have taken the test; 117 took it last year. A total of 101 passed it and achieved certification.

“Whether you pass the exam or not, it’s an excellent tool for validating where you are and, through a gap analysis, understanding the opportunities for improvement that exist,” says Baldridge. “The only person who fails the exam is the one who doesn’t take it.”

The test taker is the only person who sees the results and score. Reliability and business unit leaders will meet with the test taker to discuss the results in a general sense and create action plans for development and growth.

As a sustaining member in SMRPCO, Cargill annually receives aggregate data that provides a snapshot of its relative strengths and weaknesses.

“The shortcomings we’re seeing in many of our plants are in business management, people skills and manufacturing process reliability,” says Goshert. “This gives us the opportunity to improve in those areas.”

Katalinich, the Sioux City plant manager, is an advocate of the exam and its importance to the company.

“It’s challenging and difficult to pass,” he says. “Even if you don’t pass, it’s very worthwhile. Spending time preparing for it and going through it, I learned plenty about the potential of our improvement process and what it can do for us on a plant, unit and company level. It reinvigorated me.”

Twenty oilseeds unit employees, including eight from backgrounds outside of maintenance, are now certified. Katalinich is one of them.

“Our goal is to have a CMRP at every Cargill location in the near future,” says Baldridge.

A firm foundation

Over the past decade, Cargill has increased its productivity and performance and reduced its overall costs as a result of its reliability improvements.

The company doesn’t directly report on the link between percentages and dollar totals to the initiative. As a privately held company, it doesn’t have to dish out such information to appease Wall Street. Its leaders can simply smile and offer clues that focusing on reliability has been time and money well spent.

“My position didn’t exist five years ago,” says Goshert. “Maintenance and Reliability COE members are sought out for advice in different areas. Our sphere of influence is growing throughout the company.”

“We function on the foundation of sound reliability,” says Baldridge. “It’s a difference maker.”

That’s Cargill’s take. Now, what does reliability mean to you?