Something good up its sleeve

Dunlop golf ball plant makes proactive maintenance a key driver

by Paul V. Arnold

Golf has much in common with plant maintenance.

More than 20 million Americans play golf each year, but 80 percent of them don’t regularly shoot a score less than 100. 

If you golf, chances are great that you’re a hacker — a recreational golfer who spends most of the round in the woods, deep grass, ponds and bunkers.  Consistency is lacking; frustration and lost balls are plentiful. 

In the manufacturing world, nearly 400,000 plants are located in the U.S., but a large majority of their maintenance departments (is 80 percent a stretch?) don’t regularly perform in a proactive mode.

If you work in maintenance, chances are great that you’re a firefighter — a mechanic or manager who spends most of the day in broken machines and people’s faces.  Mechanical consistency is lacking; frustration and lost production time are plentiful.

Dunlop Slazenger is doing what it can to address both situations. 

For the hacker, Dunlop’s plant in Westminster, S.C. (the only site worldwide that manufacturers Dunlop, Slazenger and Maxfli branded product), makes 384,000 golf balls each day, 96 million annually.  So, don’t worry.  No matter how many balls you shank, your local sporting goods shop won’t run out of the little white devils.

For the maintenance worker at that plant, significant changes were made in the way that department is structured and functions.  The result is less running out to fight fires, and more analysis, communication, foresight, value and throughput.

Dunlop is driven to succeed.

In the rough
Author Lawrence Martin offers a nine-step program to golf improvement in his book, “Why Are You Still a Hacker?”  Step 1 is admitting you’re a hacker.  For the Dunlop plant, maintenance improvement began when it acknowledged its firefighting ways.

“Maintenance didn’t bring value to the plant other than ‘fix it when it breaks,’” says Katherine Sitler, the strategic planning and operational support manager.

Says maintenance planner Jason Barnes,“We were a reactive organization.  Nothing was planned.  We had more than 20 guys who just did emergency breakdowns.”

Tradition, psychology and plant environment fueled the firefighting culture.

“I’ve been in maintenance at a lot of places over the past 30-plus years, and this plant was no different from most anyone else,” says Jerry Henson, the director of engineering services.  “When things break down and you are capable of bringing it back up quickly, there are feelings of accomplishment.  You are the hero saving the day.  Many people live in that world and enjoy it.”

Like most U.S. plants, a separation between maintenance and operations kept a reactive mode in check.

“The feeling from operations was, ‘I don’t want to see you unless the machine’s broken,’” says Sitler.  “There was little cooperation from either side.  When the machine went down, maintenance came to fix it and the operators went on break.”

Maintenance was “the necessary evil” unless it was taking care of an emergency call.

New VP plays through
Step 2 in Martin’s golf book is “Commit to improvement.”  Vice president of manufacturing Greg Gianforcaro provided the necessary commitment and game plans when he came to Dunlop from Scott Paper in 2000.

“Greg brought a vision of what he thought maintenance should do and what role it should play,” says Sitler.  “He envisioned the maintenance technicians and operating group working together as a team to ensure that the equipment is available when you need it.”

Who is the “you” in “when you need it”?  There is a reason for that ambiguity.  No doubt, operations needs the machines to get product out the door.  But maintenance would need access, too, in order to monitor machine health and perform tasks that reduce or eliminate the chance of costly breakdowns.

Gianforcaro sold maintenance leadership on that proactive thinking, and formal preventive maintenance (PM) tasks were added to the workload in late 2000.  The early results were mixed.

“It really helped us in maintenance evaluate what we were doing and what the benefits could be if we changed,” says Sitler.

But change brought uneasiness to some maintenance technicians.

“There was an element, I don’t know if fear is the right word,” she says.  “Shifting away from firefighting, the feeling was, ‘Does this mean I’m not important anymore?’”

There were other issues, as well.

Communication between maintenance and operations needed fixing.

“None of the PMs were done through planners,” she says.  “We’d show up and the machine would be running wide open.  Operations would look at you and be like, ‘What are you doing here?’”

The PM process also needed a fix. 

“We didn’t have a good method of writing PMs,” says Barnes.  “A PM didn’t include inspecting every little part on the machine.  It didn’t break down specific machine components.  It was just generic.”

Maintenance technician buy-in would come with time and results.

The communication and process faults were addressed in early 2002. 

First, Barnes, an electronics technician, was named the full-time maintenance planner.  He now works with operations’ scheduling department to coordinate PM tasks.

“They get a PM schedule a week or two ahead of time,” he says.  “Based on that, they schedule what machines are going to run what product.  They have flexibility to move some of the products from different machinery around our schedule.  If they have problems, they have enough time to call me.  We can then take our maintenance list and adjust.” 

Second, meaningful and consistent PMs resulted from adopting Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM), an initiative Gianforcaro championed while at Scott Paper.

Analyzing the swing
Step 3 in Martin’s golf book is “Take lessons from a pro.”  Step 4 is “Understand ball flight.”  Dunlop got instruction from Doug Plucknette, a consultant who formerly led the RCM program at Eastman Kodak.  He helped plant employees get a better understanding of their machinery.

RCM involves closely examining individual machines (and their components) and identifying the potential risks, failure modes and solutions to enhanced reliability.  It revolves around asking seven basic questions:

1) What are the functions and associated performance standards of the asset in its present operating context?

2) In what ways does it fail to fulfill its functions (failure mode)?

3) What causes each failure?

4) What happens when each functional failure occurs?

5) In what way does each failure matter?

6) What can be done to prevent each failure?

7) What should be done if a suitable preventive task can’t be found (default tasks)?

An RCM Blitz team — a four- to six-person group consisting of maintenance technicians, engineers, managers and operators (remember Gianforcaro’s call to work together as a team?) — is responsible for getting the answers to those questions.

“The Blitz team decides on the best way to address the asset,” says Sitler.  “Is it through a detailed, meaningful list of PM instructions?  Some predictive maintenance work?  An engineering redesign?”

Barnes says PMs are now the result of “what the team sees, what operators say, what technicians have worked on and what the managers discuss in meetings.”

Seventeen RCM blitzes have been done to date, and the results of each have been impressive.

As an example, one Blitz team spent five days (eight hours per day) examining a buffing machine that removes a seam incurred in the ball’s injection-molding stage and sands the object in preparation for painting and stamping.

“We broke it down to three main components and did an analysis on them,” says Henson.  “The team got a whole new awareness and understanding on what this machine did and how it could be maximized.”

The examination revealed opportunities and potential cures.

“One of the problems we used to have was bearings going out on the machine’s spindles,” says buffing operator and Blitz team member Cheryl Gilliam.  “When the bearings went out, they made a bad buff on the ball.  Sometimes, it would really destroy the ball.  Since we’ve begun the new PMs, we haven’t had nearly the trouble we did before.  It also improved quality and throughput.”

Throughput on the machine is up 26 percent since installation of the team’s corrections.

“That number — 26 percent — turned heads and got people excited,” says Sitler.  “Seeing what took place, people know that when they participate, they can make a difference.”

Eyes on the green
Steps 5 through 7 in Martin’s golf fix-it manual involve proper setup and effective greens strategies.  The Dunlop plant mirrored those steps when it toppled the remaining barriers between maintenance and operations.  Gianforcaro’s vision of “the maintenance technicians and operating group working together as a team” became a reality when maintenance was spun off into two groups.  In the new setup, 11 of the plant’s 40 technicians remain in the “central” group and 29 reside in a hybrid “embedded” group.

Central technicians perform full-time maintenance activities — PMs, machinery upgrades, repairs and rebuilds — around the plant.

“The majority of our best-skilled, top maintenance guys are in this group,” says Henson.  “That allows us to get the most of the minimal number of people we have.”

The embedded employees spend 80 percent of their time devoted to one particular production area.  For the four days a week they work in this area, these technicians do as much production work as they do maintenance work (PMs, repairs and adjustments).

“They do many of the higher-skilled jobs there,” says Sitler.  “They are responsible for running the injection-molding machines.  Some prepare and operate the large presses.  Some run the paint system.”

The other 20 percent of an embedded technician’s time is spent working out of the central group.

The benefits have been twofold.

“The relationship between operations and maintenance improved because the embedded guys are there; they are involved with them most every day,” says Henson.  “It’s led to understanding and a better flow of information.”

It also helped the plant stay competitive in the global marketplace.

“Costs are important,” says Sitler.  “If your maintenance processes are working, there isn’t something that needs to be repaired or worked on 24 hours a day.  You can use your maintenance people in other ways that help you be more productive and achieve lower overall costs.”

While some embedded techs would prefer not to split their schedule — “They’d rather work on the car than drive it,” quips Henson — most are economic realists and also have enjoyed the extra attention from operations.

“Operators love their embedded technicians . . . to the point where they don’t want to share them with others,” says Sitler.

Says R.L. Webb, a technician in the central group, “Thanks to the embedded setup, I think we’re looked up to a little more than in the past.  They’ve gotten to know us on a different level.”

Making the cut
Step 8 in Martin’s book is “Practicing with a purpose.”  Dunlop incorporates this into its maintenance initiative by constantly seeking ways to build the skills of its people.  A firefighter only needs to know about repair techniques.  A proactive technician must be well-rounded.

The department, led by maintenance manager Tim Hopper, is building a skills development matrix in which personnel receive formal, multiple-level training not only in advanced maintenance techniques, but also in business, people management and computer skills.

“We’re raising the bar,” says Henson.  “We want people who go out there to solve a problem, not to replace a part, and to provide a benefit to the customer.  We want people to use their brain to analyze the issues, focus on the root causes and resolve them.  We want to change the attitude to more of a professional, customer service-oriented environment where the customer is happy to see you.  You are there to provide value and a benefit.”

The leader board
Martin’s golf book on transforming a hacker concludes with Step 9, “Play often, and keep score!”  Dunlop maintenance keeps score (and documents its shift away from firefighting) with a variety of metrics that display the impact of its structural and philosophic changes.

A successful transformation can be found in the following facts:

• Barnes says more than 400 PM tasks are now effectively managed.  The percentage of completed PM tasks currently exceeds 90 percent and is closing in on 95 percent, a sharp rise from the 85 percent it posted just two years ago.

“On equipment we traditionally had problems with, the frequency of failure is much less,” says Henson.

• In the first half of 2004, planned work orders exceeded unplanned work orders by a 2-to-1 margin.  That’s a big turnaround from 2000, when there was little planned work.

“Emergency work orders have significantly decreased, and it continues to go down,” says Henson.  “The reliability of the equipment has increased substantially.”

• The metric “maintenance cost per dozen balls produced” shows a major drop — from a high of 77 cents in September 2003 to 24 cents in both May and June of this year.

“Our guys want to get it done right the first time and look for ways to improve the process,” says Barnes.

With consumers having an insatiable appetite for Dunlop’s family of golf ball brands (the plant has posted off-the-chart production numbers this year), the company has needed the extra efficiency, uptime and throughput. 

While there’s no time to rest on its laurels, maintenance can at least smile and show its dimples.

“We’re on the journey,” says Henson.  “We know where we want to go and how to get there.”

This article appeared in the October/November 2004 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright 2004.

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