Equipment Readiness: The 80% You Can Build at a Desk, and the 20% You Can't

(upbeat music) - Good day, and welcome back to maintenance break. Fight sized in science, one break at a time. I'm Pete. - And I'm Drew. Pete, before we even say what this episode's about, I wanna tell you about the first 797F fleet we worked on that was assembled on side. - I don't remember that one, go on. - During that build, they rerouted the filter mounting points. Move the rounds so you could change on that ground level, not wedged up in between the chassis on a ladder, where the OEM assembly originally had them. - And nobody wrote that down. - Not in any of the documentation, no. It was the right call made on the tools in real time by people solving a genuine access problem. It just never made it back into the documentation the next crew would be working from. That's this whole episode in one story, honestly. Let's define the split properly, because 80/20 gets thrown around loosely, and I don't think it's as clean as 20% of your procedures come back wrong. What's actually in the 80%? - It's everything you can genuinely build without the machine in front of you, and it's not a small effort, real engineering work. OEM manuals and drawings, a criticality analysis, which components take the whole asset down if they fail, versus which ones you can run to failure. And FMEA off that criticality ranking, then a full PM strategy on top of it, tasks, frequencies, acceptable limits, built against the manufacturer's data and your own experience with similar assets. And that connects straight back to what we covered last episode, systems. - Exactly, none of that 80% is worth anything if it's not loaded into a proper functional location structure. That's the systems lens doing its job underneath the equipment lens. You can have a brilliant PM strategy on paper and a garbage master data set, and it never makes it to the people doing the work. Your modders will not have it. - So that's the 80. - Real, necessary, and if you skip it, everything downstream is guess work. What's in the 20? - Everything that only exists once a person is standing next to the physical asset. We walked all 40 procedures against that 797F fleet once it was actually on the ground. 11 of them had something worth changing. Not 11 disasters, some were small. The filter mounting was one of them. Let me guess. The service documentation still had the old location. - Exactly. The procedure was built entirely off the original OEM drawing set. Calling out a filter mounting point that on this fleet didn't exist anymore. Nobody had gone back and updated the drawing set the procedure was built from because the change happened on the tools during assembly not on anyone's desk. - So what actually happens on the tools next time someone new runs that procedure? - They go to where the page tells them, find nothing there and start searching the machine for where it's actually gone. Best case, they know the fleet will enough to find it quickly. Worst case, they're poking round areas that task was never scoped or risk assessed for because the paper works describing a machine that doesn't match the one in front of them. - All right, let's run that through the triad. It's a clean example even without a drama attached to it. Performance first. - A filter service that should take 20 minutes stretches out closer to an hour every time because the text checking the drawing, not finding what's on it and hunting the machine for where it actually sits. - An extra 40 minutes doesn't sound like much until you say it out loud on every truck, every service. It isn't much once. It's the kind of thing that just gets absorbed into servicing always takes a bit longer than the sheet says. Nobody flags it because nobody's counting the minutes against what was actually planned, which takes us straight into cost. Same 40 minutes, different lens. - Call it 40 minutes lost per service per truck. Across a working fleet and a service interval that repeats every few hundred hours, that's real labor hours you didn't plan for. Stacking up over the life of that procedure before anyone's even touched the actual job the procedure was written for. - And that's before you've fixed anything. That's leakage, the cost of the document being wrong. - Exactly, and risk is the one and people miss because nothing went wrong on this fleet. Nobody got hurt over a filter mount. - But you wouldn't be telling the story if that's all it ever was. It's not every time a trade is off-searching for a component that isn't where the paperwork says it is. They're working outside the task that was actually planned and risk assessed for. That's exactly the kind of gap that turns into an incident on a different day with a different component, somewhere a lot less forgiving than a filter housing. - So the 80% didn't fail because the engineering was sloppy. It just never got checked against what actually happened during assembly. Those last minute mods and changes to make the system better. - That's exactly it Pete. And that's the 20%. Not a training exercise, not a formality, someone qualified, physically walking the procedure against the actual machine, confirming access points, isolation points and configuration, match what's written before that procedure ever gets released to a crew. It connects straight back to the people lens two episodes ago because the person best place to do that walk down, isn't a desk engineer who's never touched the fleet. It's the tradesperson who's going to execute the procedure day in, day out. Do that verification without them and you fix the document but you still haven't built their ownership of it. - Which is the whole series sitting in one example really. People needs the operating philosophy and the skills mix right. Systems needs the master data loaded and verified. Equipment needs the 80% built properly and the 20% verified in the field with the people who'll actually use it. Pull any one of those out and the other two don't save you. - That's the whole point of operational readiness. It was never a checklist you complete once. It's three things that have to be true at the same time. Your people, your systems and your equipment before that asset earns the right to be called ready. - All right Drew, let's bring the series home. - Here's this week's break tip. Pick one procedure for an asset that's arrived on your site in the last 12 months. Doesn't matter if it's mobile or fixed planned. Find out has anyone actually walked that procedure against the real machine since it was written or is it still exactly what came off the drawing board? If nobody can answer that with a straight yes, go and do it yourself tomorrow with the tradesperson who'll be executing it. Confirm every access point and isolation point matches what's on the page. - And if you find a gap and based on what we've seen, you probably will on more than a quarter of them. That's not a failure. That's the 20% doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Catching it now on a walk down is a lot cheaper than someone finding out live on the tools mid-service. - That's people, systems and equipment. The three lenses and the whole reason this series exists. Get all three right before the asset arrives and it earns its keep from day one. Get any one of them wrong and you'll spend the next year paying for it in exactly the currencies we've talked about. Performance, cost and risk. - That's the operational readiness series. If you've got a fleet or a fixed plant upgrade coming, go back through people, systems and equipment and ask yourself honestly where your gap's set. Be sure to subscribe to follow along for other great insights. Until next time, take care. ♪ Keep those assets running ♪