Are you being ruined by best efforts: does your maintenance & reliability strategy really support defect elimination and incident avoidance?

We continually see reports on high profile industrial failures and the impact these have on people and our environment, not least the operating companies involved. These failures are often attributed to the failure of the organisations to manage the risks, ineffective leadership and failure to follow prescribed standards. In the case of maintenance and reliability standards, there is wide-spread acceptance and knowledge of what is known to be best practices. So why is it that we regularly see incidents where companies have failed to “adhere to the rules”? All too often, many organisations attempt to adopt best practices and industry standards, with a view of “being seen to be doing something” or selecting the elements of best practices that are seen as “the key”. This paper explores, through a case study, where elements of good practice were in place, but still resulted in an unforeseen catastrophic failure, impacting on operations and performance. This case study demonstrates that even when efforts and investment are made, organisations still experience costly failures, which also impact on the credibility of the investment in maintenance and reliability efforts. Therefore, without considering the fundamental elements of maintenance and reliability (asset management) best practice, i.e. management information systems, foundational data, work flows, fault recording, planning and scheduling, incident / failure investigation, etc, together with the absolute need in addressing organisational change (structures, culture and practices), then hard work and best efforts will not be enough.