Experiencing All Roles In Mining
The following is an edited excerpt from the book Simplifying Mining Maintenance: A Practical Guide to Building a Culture that Prevents Breakdowns and Increases Profits by Gerard Wood.
My first job in mining was as an apprentice electrician on the shop floor at a BHP coal mine, working exclusively on preventive maintenance and rarely on emergency repairs or breakdowns. I was studying electrical engineering at night to earn my degree.
At the time, computerised maintenance management systems (CMMS) were just emerging and had not been used in mining, but our team still achieved good reliability with the machines we serviced. CMMS are designed to help you keep track of a complex machine’s or large fleet’s scheduled and corrective maintenance activities, lubrication, alignment, and the like, but we relied more on what we saw and heard in our inspections.
We listened for unnatural vibrations, inspected for worn parts, and looked for any signs of overheating or lubrication leaks. Most of us had a strong work ethic and a genuine desire to make sure these machines never broke down. At that time, each tradesperson had areas of the machines that they were responsible for, so if that area suffered a breakdown, everyone knew who missed the signs of the defect. You didn’t want to be that guy.
Consequently, most tradespeople had a high level of ownership and pride in their work. They didn’t need someone looking over their shoulder to make sure they did the job right. The tradies felt responsible when a machine broke down, so they worked hard to prevent that from happening. Their motto was, “Do it once, do it right the first time.”
The mining industry started using the CMMS about the time I became a supervisor. The CMMS helped us to plan maintenance and improve our machines’ performance by enhancing the efficiency of our scheduled maintenance and keeping a record of all the machines’ defects. This was successful because the core maintenance work was already done correctly, so the availability of our machines improved. Many of us thought the CMMS was the solution to all our problems.
Over time, however, the computers began to drive the way we worked. Before the CMMS, we made up for a lack of maintenance planning with workmanship and attention to detail. After the computers took over, that attention to detail eroded as the mining industry went through workforce changes and the computers dictated when and where we should work. We lost the deep knowledge of our machines’ conditions. We stopped listening for ominous vibrations or looking for suspicious leaks because the computer didn’t tell us to.
Over time, we just measured whether the job was opened and closed, not how the work was executed. These days, we try to fix work-execution quality problems that lead to unscheduled maintenance events with planning and scheduling through CMMS systems. Unfortunately, planning and scheduling creates more efficient scheduled downtime but not improved reliability.
Back To The Basics
I worked as an apprentice for four years, then as a tradesperson for four or five years before becoming a frontline supervisor. After several years as an electrical and mechanical supervisor, I went on to become a maintenance planner, a superintendent, an engineer, and then a maintenance manager before I joined the Global Maintenance Network (GMN). At this time, I was exposed to the theories and the term “asset management,” which we used to call maintenance and reliability.
At GMN, I was on a team that rolled out the training in work-management processes, including defect elimination, root-cause analysis, Six Sigma, the SAP CMMS, and so forth. We introduced these workflow processes to various sites, but it was up to the people at those sites to implement them.
What I noticed over the next five years was that we didn’t get the reliability we expected. I visited these sites where we’d done all this training and implemented these programs, and the results were poor or no better than before. Business didn’t improve, and equipment didn’t become more reliable. Consequently, the company revised all the maintenance work management procedures. The managers figured workers didn’t follow the process because they didn’t understand them, so they wrote them in greater detail. Unfortunately, the procedures became more complicated and even fewer people understood them.
This frustrated me, so I started studying reliability-centred maintenance and other alternatives. I looked for solutions that could be implemented across multiple sites that would make a company-wide difference.
I also decided to go back to the line-management game. I wanted to reconnect with my roots and go back to the way I was taught — the practical side of things. Instead of traveling around from one site to the next and facilitating improvement programs, I wanted to work at the same site every day for a longer period so I could see what it took to improve machine reliability and to implement the theory I had learned. So I took another maintenance manager’s position at a coal mine owned by Anglo American and went back to the coal face.
While Anglo was different from other companies I had worked for, the processes were fundamentally the same. However, maintenance processes had become much more complicated than when I was on the floor. It was no longer a simple matter of highly trained tradespeople responsible for a discrete piece of equipment.
Instead, tradesmen might work on dozens of different machines, their work changing dramatically from day to day. They were still skilled, but they had no personal history with a machine that would help them spot potential problems and make note of when to address them. The CMMS was good and efficiently deployed people to the right job with the right tools, but these work management metrics were not helping tradies develop the type of craftsmanship that in the past had kept machines running smoothly.
The corporate culture is often to blame when maintenance practices deteriorate. Companies establish key performance indicators (KPIs) for the maintenance crew, and workers stick to those KPIs instead of focusing on quality. Was the job finished? Yes. Was it completed in time? Yes. These guys meet their KPIs, but no one questions the work. No one asks if they noticed any potential problems they should note. There is no KPI that says the guy did a weld that will last or that he cleaned out all the dirt from the component before he fitted it. You can’t measure those things, but they are the principal reasons why equipment remains reliable or not.
The workers understand what quality work is, but when no one talks about it or checks to ensure it happens, they also forget about it. They have no sense of ownership because no one expects them to have one.
It became clear to me that we needed to simplify things for all involved. One of the first things I did was implement a structure in which the same people were consistently looking after the same equipment.
I also worked to improve communication. When you’re at the same site every day, you can see, for instance, that one planner doesn’t like one particular supervisor, and as a result, the two of them never talk to each other. If you want to improve planning and preventive maintenance, these two people must communicate every day, learning from what went wrong and improving procedures so the preventive maintenance can be more efficient.
In addition to these changes, I began coaching my engineers in how to use a simple root-cause analysis process and effective defect elimination. We didn’t build a new model, but we tweaked existing processes so they would work better, were easier to carry out, and incorporated the principles of effective management of failure modes. This improved equipment reliability and cost performance.
I learned that tradespeople want their work to be predictable and routine. They want consistency so they can find a rhythm. They don’t want things to change all the time. They need repetition in their work so they can get better at their jobs. They get faster, more precise, and can keep on top of the never-ending defects that are continually generated as equipment mines the material in harsh conditions. That’s when they take pride in their work because they can see they are making a positive difference and achieving small wins.
Stressing The Basics
This experience and the desire to grow personally inspired me to start my own company, Bluefield Asset Management Specialists. Although we work for many different mining companies, similar to a central maintenance department, our job is more hands-on. Sites engage us to assist them to complete a range of services across the life cycle of equipment — from asset evaluation to operational readiness and reliability improvement. Our focus is on the practical, simple solutions that bring both short-term and long-term equipment performance improvement. When sites engage us to assist them with their maintenance-improvement effort, we do not go there to fix the problems and leave. Instead, we enable our client’s people to work as one team and prevent the problems from continuing. We fade out as the mining company’s people take on the challenge.
We don’t have a silver bullet for all problems, but the Bluefield Project or Transformation Process that we use engages the hearts and minds of the people and encourages them to take ownership and implement strategies that work. We stress the basics because 80 percent (my guesstimate) of the mining industry does the basics very poorly. There is a tremendous need in the industry for strategies focused on quality execution, ownership, and practical, simple solutions.
These are the strategies I describe in this book. We’ve had appreciable results with the companies we’ve worked with over the last seven years, but to improve equipment reliability across the mining industry, I need to share this approach with many, many more people. I can’t just keep going out and doing it myself as a service provider or even with our whole team involved; we have only so much time!
I’m writing this book so people can use and tailor this approach to improve their own operations. Tens of thousands of people can make a difference with the knowledge in this book. I hope you’re one of them.
The Value Of The Right Culture
Over the last ten or twelve years, the industry has started referring to maintenance as “asset management,” but the terms are not synonymous. Asset management encompasses the entire process of managing an asset — how we buy the asset, how we operate it, how we maintain it, and how we dispose of it. Maintenance is just one part of that life cycle, but it’s a significant percentage of the asset management pie.
It’s critical for us to keep these definitions in mind because it is so easy to use these terms interchangeably. This book, as the title suggests, is just about simplifying the maintenance aspect of asset management.
In the next chapter, I will introduce my Maintenance Improvement Model, which emphasises the importance of a culture built on a foundation of core values. The model illustrates how to think about continually improving maintenance. It starts with a constant desire to improve. Without a desire to improve and a belief that our actions can significantly impact the performance of the equipment, nothing changes.
When I visit a mine site that achieves excellent results from its equipment, there are two things that always stand out: the people are unflinchingly focused on improving, and they never doubt their ability to influence the performance of their equipment.
At one mine in the Hunter Valley in Australia that I visited recently, the maintenance team didn’t have all the latest CMMS, but they had an exemplary attitude. They achieved a nearly 91.8 percent availability rate for their truck fleet, which is outstanding, but all they talked about while I was there was how they wanted to reach 92.8 percent. We visited another site in Ghana that had zero systems in place. The truck fleet was in shambles, but the maintenance crew achieved remarkable performance from their drilling equipment.
Drills are notorious for breaking down, but the guy who was in charge of the drills maintained an extreme level of ownership over them. When a mechanic did any work on the drills, the manager wouldn’t let the mechanic leave until he had inspected the services performed and had signed off on the quality of the mechanic’s work. If an operator damaged a machine, they had to help mechanics fix it before the equipment could be put back into operation.
You must have that kind of devotion to quality. I’ve never seen a site with reliable equipment that didn’t have a crew that was passionate and eager about its work. Maintenance crews can have all the systems and processes and CMMS in the world, but if they don’t have a staunch commitment to servicing their machinery, the results will be substandard.
How do you create this culture? Read on to find out. In the next chapter, we’ll explore my Maintenance Improvement Model. (I call it my model, but it is a compilation of all I have learned from so many in the industry over my career.)
You’ll see that a desire to improve is a foundational step that must be supported by the right values required for reaching your goals for equipment reliability and financial outcomes.
To keep reading, pick up Simplifying Mining Maintenance: A Practical Guide to Building a Culture that Prevents Breakdowns and Increases Profits by Gerard Wood.
