by Arne Oas

Few business and maintenance topics receive more attention these days than the one of reliability. Most organizations know they are vulnerable to losses that can happen at any time, resulting from minutes to days of unplanned equipment downtime. Current levels of awareness, spending, attention to equipment and interest in plant reliability are at an all-time high. Yet, when these organizations are asked, “How reliable is your facility?”, the usual answer is blank stares and silence.

Why? Trying to move an enterprise from a reactive maintenance mode to one that provides a proactive response can prove to be a monumental task. No matter how hard we try, nothing seems to happen. Change is never easy, and attempting to change an organization’s culture is an arduous task even when all goes well. I believe the main reason for this difficulty in changing culture stems from the hard time people have in “seeing” the objective and understanding how their established prejudices interact with the change. Without visualizing these objectives, it is no wonder any new program has a hard time reaching its goals. Solutions prove to be few and far between.

I recently had a chance to participate in one approach that helps to change the mind-set of its participants. It is “The Reliability Game.” Improvement games have been utilized on the manufacturing side of the house for a number of years, but not much has been done on the maintenance side. This particular game is designed to teach participants how to make the transition from a reactive to proactive maintenance environment. As with many board games, it is based on money. As employees play a part, they learn to follow the “flow of money” through the enterprise. 

In doing so, they further their understanding of the real business decisions behind a proactive, reliability approach to maintenance.

The game is designed to be used by teams of four people who take on the following roles:
• Finance manager
• Purchasing coordinator
• Maintenance resource planner
• Operations coordinator

The roles and game mimic real plant requirements. The object is to allow the teams to determine how to best manage and allocate their equipment, money, time, labor and MRO material resources. The teams are under pressure to maintain or improve production capacity, reduce in-plant warehouse stocking levels and minimize labor requirements while improving throughput. The individual players bring all their preconceived notions and prejudices to the table on maintenance and production operations, planning and scheduling. Each team’s progress is tracked through each round of play and the results discussed at the end of the day. At the game’s conclusion, there is a heightened appreciation for the value of reliability and a new openness to the proactive reliability philosophy. 

“The Reliability Game” has been successfully employed as a tool at a number of Fortune 500 companies. Several of these companies require all (not just plant or maintenance) of their management and supervisory staff to play the game as part of their professional development.

Arne Oas is the senior maintenance consultant at Management Resources Group. If you have a maintenance management software question, contact Coach Oas at 215-918-2165, or e-mail oasa@mrginc.net.

This article appeared in the December 2002/January 2003 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright 2003.

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