Why is Reactive Bad?

How many times have you seen the P-F Curve? If you are not familiar with it, it is a curve that shows relative time from when a failure starts to when it ends with catastrophic results. It identifies when certain preventive actions can be taken to prevent failure. Reactive organizations are commonly working to fix catastrophic failures instead of working on the preventive tasks.

Let’s look at some of the reasons why we should make the effort to break out of the reactive state and some actions you can take to get the process started. The following list is in no particular order; and each action can be taken by itself or together with other actions. Each will have a positive impact on shifting away from reactive. More can be added to this list, but this is a great starting point.

1. Increased repair time due to planning on the fly

When a failure occurs, you need to fix it. If you are in a reactive state of maintenance, you probably don’t have any job plans in place. The result of this is that you will need to figure out how to fix the failure. It may be simple, or it may be more complex. It may be a failure that is not impactful to your operations, or it could shut you down completely. If it is the latter, you want to be able to correct the failure as quickly as you can to limit the impact of the failure. If you had a job plan with all the correct steps and parts needed to repair the failure, your time to repair will be much less than if you had to figure out how to make the repair. There is a metric that states unplanned work takes five times longer than planned work. Bottom line is that with a proper job plan:

1. The downtime associated with the failure is reduced
2. The cost of downtime is reduced
3. The chance of rework is reduced

If you don’t have job plans in place, then where do you start? The first step is to identify your most critical assets. Those are the ones that will shut down your operation. Work on those first and identify the most common failures. If you have job plans in place for those, you will start to move out of the reactive state.

2. Budgets are hard to control

To me, this just makes sense. We all have a budget that we are working towards, and if we have avoidable failures because we are reactive, our budgets will be hard to control. Emergency work just costs more. It takes longer because we are not ready for it, we end up ordering parts at the last minute sometimes incurring higher than normal shipping fees, and it prevents us from doing other work that could possibly prevent a failure from happening. Overtime hours are higher because we need to get the plant back online.

3. Decrease assets life expectancies

Reactive work tends to mean that we identified the problem long after the point of failure began. As such, the asset may be in a deteriorated state resulting in a decreased life expectancy. If we can identify the failure with condition monitoring, we have more time to plan the work, and we have a better chance at a repair when the asset has not migrated into a deteriorated state.

4. Sporadic equipment downtime

Many years ago, I toured an automobile plant in Baltimore and was shocked at how often the assembly line stopped after an alarm went off somewhere. Then came the announcement for the maintenance team to report to a specific place on the line. I wonder if the fact that that plant is no longer there had anything to do with the constant downtime. What is the cost of downtime for your organization? Reducing downtime will have a positive impact on your bottom line and may improve the morale of your workforce.

5. Impact on planned and preventive work

In a reactive state, you spend the majority of your time fighting fires, scrambling to get the plant back online and once that effort is complete, it starts all over again. I met with a maintenance manager who kept being called out of the office to respond to another failure. While he was gone, I was reviewing some of the PMs and was surprised to find one on the hot water space heater in the break room. Why? It was a PM to clean the fins on the heater coil. The only problem was it was August and very hot outside. It should have been a seasonal PM. I wonder if this PM was always done because that break room was air conditioned. Make sure you are doing the right work at the right time.

6. Smaller issues can turn into bigger issues

Reactive organizations are not prepared to identify smaller issues that can be prevented from growing into bigger issues. Typically, this is due to inadequate PM programs and a lack of tracking failures resulting in more failures that could have been prevented. It’s a vicious circle, wash – rinse – repeat. If you could spend time identifying issues before they turn into failures, you will have more time to plan work and more time to prevent failures.

7. Repeat Failures

How many times have you had to rush through a repair and a few days later the same failure happens again? If you do not have a plan for the work with the right steps and parts, the likelihood of the same or a related failure happening again is very high. Are these failures being tracked? There is a wealth of information that can be derived from failure tracking. Are you listening to your assets?

8. No time to work on improvements

Whenever something fails, you need to investigate why it failed. There are several processes for this, RCFA, RCFMEA, Five Whys, and Fish Bone diagrams. All reliability groups have different ways to conduct root cause failure analysis to identify what happened, why it happened and how to prevent it. If you are fighting fires, you won’t have time to investigate. You should have a dedicated resource on staff in this role. In the long run, you will identify how to make improvements and establish a culture of continuous improvement.

9. Trouble keeping resources

In a reactive state, morale will suffer. Fighting fires is not the best approach to maintenance. Folks will start to look for other jobs due to low levels of satisfaction and the feeling of being used. In high performing operations, people are trained in predictive approaches and understand the value of their efforts. They tend to be on the lookout for ways to improve things instead of just fixing them. It’s hard to find good workers. It’s even harder to keep them if you are in a reactive state.

10. Minimal performance tracking

Metrics play a key role in making adjustments to operations and require alignment between strategic goals of the organization and the processes in place. For example, if you have a strategic goal of producing the highest quality product for the lowest cost, but your work management process does not require a technician to capture costs against an asset, the process is not aligned with the goal. Does your workforce know what the goal is and what is being tracked? Communicate the goals with the workforce and make sure they understand the reasons you are implementing changes.

11. Data quality

Data quality will suffer in a reactive state. Unplanned work, technicians fighting fires, no work order. The actual data that should be captured for repair work gets lost in the shuffle. If data is captured, it is usually not accurate. What happens when you try to run a report of what resources were spent on specific assets. You may have the total costs, but how easy is it to split out the costs by assets. Do you track mean time to repair, mean time between failures. What about failure codes? Without accurate data, decisions are based on a gut feeling, and your digital transformation will not go well.

However, there is some good news; all is not lost. If you are reactive and struggling to break free and are looking to get to a more preventive or predictive state, your first step is admitting you have a problem. You will need help with developing a roadmap or plan of attack and you may need some outside help to get things started. Start by taking a hard look at your current performance and identify quick fixes that will get you moving asset management forward and get you firmly on the road to continuous improvement.

Discover how Maven Asset Management can help you become less reactive. Get in touch with the author by email mmidas@mavenasset.com.

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