Flavor of the day: Terror isn’t just for airplanes anymore
Christmas Day. Terror in the skies! A bomb and a terrorist pass through airport screening undetected. If not for a failure to detonate, there would be many lives lost over American soil.
It will certainly seem that I am rambling off-subject for a maintenance blog as I talk about terror in the skies (and in a minute, terror on the ground). I promise I will bring this thing back to maintenance, at least tangentially.
We are still reading as the details unfold about the brazen attack on Christmas Day. One of the things that seems clear is that many of us had let our guards down since 9/11. We had grown less interested than we once were.
I recognize this in a related area of my professional life. When I am not working on maintenance systems, part of my consulting practice is in “food defense”, the concept of keeping the bad guys from intentionally contaminating our food supply.
There was significant interest in this topic after 9/11, as you might imagine. I regret to share with you that today there is far less interest, at least in the United States. Paradoxically, workshops I have taught in Peru, Thailand, Panama and the Caribbean have received considerable interest from their governments, universities and food industry (factories.)
I have a couple of theories why corporate America is so short-sighted. One is that our public-company, quarterly-results-driven world trains us to think and work short term instead of long term. The other is related to a term no longer in vogue but recognizable to all of us in manufacturing: the “flavor of the day”.
I think this phenomenon has gotten worse, much worse, in our right-sized, downsized, economically challenged economy of today. We have cut beyond the fat, into the bones of our organizations. We have let so many people go, we can barely do our daily work, and certainly don’t have the means to pursue more than one or two improvement initiatives.
(I sometimes make the argument that we have cut so far that we are slipping, overlooking and not getting to even our daily work and daily problems. Because of this, we are actually getting worse, less profitable, with a negative return on investment to show for all our restructuring.)
And so we went from responding to the airline terror of 9/11 and food terrorism concerns … to the bird flu preparations … to the swine flu response … to the economic downturn. At each juncture, we left behind an unfinished plan, or a newborn program left to die of atrophy. This was without malice, but also without the energy and resource to keep multiple programs sustained.
We have seen the same with industrial plant maintenance. The Total Productive Maintenance and condition-based maintenance initiatives of the 1980s were never finished or sustained. They were replaced with the proliferation of product forms in the booming 1990s, the packaging initiatives of the early 2000s, the “green” initiatives of recent years and the cost-saving cuts of this past year. As a result, many of our maintenance programs have failed to advance in the last 20 years. (See my related blog on this.)
We need to learn from the airlines, who have largely sustained robust maintenance and reliability programs (albeit under Federal Aviation Administration regulation). We also need to learn from this latest scare. We cannot let our guard down - not in our preparations against terror in the skies, not in our defense of the food supply and perhaps, with less life-threatening drama, not in our maintenance and reliability initiatives.
In your comments, tell me how the “flavor of the day” has impeded your maintenance progress.
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Filed Under: Featured, Reliability Engineering | Tags: business management, change management, maintenance management, reliability excellence, Total Productive Maintenance
Comments
By John Crossan on January 15th, 2010 at 10:52 am
Ned
Good analogies as always. I guess these days, even more so, we all just bore pretty easily. We only have about a hundred plus channels on our TV.
Looking at the TSA folks in the airports I’m amazed that they can stay focused finding nothing really significant day after day (except my wife’s brand new big bottle of sunscreen that she left in her carryon).
I guess I would argue that the initiatives you mention over the years were not total loss. I think they all gave some incremental improvement.
The manufacturing world today is much different than when I started out too many years ago. Much better from many perspectives, particularly safety, and I would say respect for the individual.
The challenge for us, I think, is to constantly revamp our message to keep it interesting and different, even though deep down, it doesn’t really change.