Have you ever wondered why it is so hard to keep track of the unplanned downtime at your organization?

If you're like most people I talk to, the response to tracking failures typically sounds like "I don't do that. Our reliability engineers manage that." With a little digging, I realized that most people don't understand the functionality and flow of information in the system.

This was my "Ah Ha" moment, and I hope it helps you connect the dots.

It all started while performing an annual physical inventory count at an Upstream Oil & Gas company almost 20 years ago. After wiping 5 years of dust off the top of a crate, I found a pile of cylinder rings that had clearly been forgotten about. I was pretty green at the time and asked the obvious question and received the VERY obvious answer of "When that machine fails, we better have it." Although the response wasn't as pleasant as I depicted, I took the feedback, licked my finger and smeared the dust off the label, noted the part number, and wrote down my count.

A few hours later, my curiosity got the better of me, and I went on a deep dive into our ERP to see if I could figure out why we were holding so many of these things. Turns out, the rings hadn't been used in a few years, and we had hundreds of them. It was crazy to me!

A few weeks later, I popped into the office of one of our Reliability Engineers and inquired about these paperweights. He explained that they were having some major issues with these cylinders a few years back, but we ended up going with a different style ring due to something the rings were made of. He then pulled up a cause mapping exercise they went through to identify the issues, and I was hooked. I signed up for his next "5 Why" class and learned how engineers think about tracking and eliminating failures at a program level. (If you've never taken a Cause Mapping course, I highly recommend it.)

Fast forward a decade, I ended up in a director role leading Enterprise Asset Management, Procurement, and Supply Chain Management, and I spent a lot of time connecting failures and material masters. It never occurred to me that people in other companies didn't do this as well. I figured we were just behind the times and tried to learn as much as I could to catch us up to the rest of the civilized world.

Boy was I wrong.

After joining Lexin Solutions a few years ago, I've had the privilege to speak with so many people about connecting Supply Chain and Maintenance through standard ERP functionality. What is so alarming is the basic misunderstanding of how Supply Chain and Maintenance work together, particularly in the SAP Plant Maintenance and Materials Management space. Some organizations track failures on a spreadsheet. Some use material consumption tied to corrective maintenance work orders. Others rely on their vendors to tell them what's failing (BAD IDEA!). There's a wide range of answers to the problem, but most people I talk to just don't understand what they already own. This article is my attempt to correct this.

Full disclaimer: I'm not an engineer, nor will I ever tell you that I know more about how a suction valve on a compressor works than anyone else out there. BUT, I can tell you that I understand how SAP wants to collect data, and the process it uses to collect and drive standard reports to enable organizations to manage unplanned failures without needing to carry boxes of dust-covered cylinder rings "Just in Case."

Here's the Playbook

1. Work Notification — Identify the Failure and Record the Failure

SAP utilizes key fields on the work notification to capture information about why the failure occurred. This has NOTHING to do with the part number that failed. (We'll get to that later in the Work Order section.)

Here's what we're after when we create a notification:

1. What Failed? (Specific Equipment Record)
   
   

2. Priority of the required work (Based on impact to People, Environment, Production, and Reputation)
   
   

3. Why the failure occurred (Failure Codes)
   
   

Failure codes are a little different at each organization, but here's what I recommend tracking:

The idea is to enable your team to trend what's failing across the enterprise. Using the centrifugal pump example, if you're having lots of impeller failures, it's time to dig into why. (We'll talk about that in the Analytics section.)

2. Work Orders — Plan, Schedule, and Execute the Repair

Once your notification is approved and the work order is created, it's time to order parts. This is where most people miss the boat, because it's hard. We're always in a hurry to get equipment back online, especially if it's high priority. Free text requisitions, vendor call-outs, and raiding local "off book" inventory stashes are typical responses.

Unfortunately — and honestly, understandably — these are tolerated because production and cash flow is king. Who's going to get mad that I got that critical pump running again?

Typically, these folks are celebrated. BUT this is how it should flow:

1. Create the work order from the breakdown notification.
   
   

2. Add the parts needed (WITH A MATERIAL NUMBER) to the work order. DON'T SKIP THE MATERIAL NUMBER. FREE TEXT REQUISITIONS WILL DESTROY YOUR RELIABILITY PROGRAM! TRUST ME.
   
   

3. Repair the equipment and THEN finish the Failure Codes from the Notification section.

3. Analyze Failure Data

This is where your discipline pays off. Remember, most of the time people are looking for failures in areas they control. They're stuck in the forest looking at the trees. This is a good thing for each individual area, but a bad thing for the overall organization. Global Maintenance & Reliability programs run off good data. Having the discipline to build drop-down catalogs that are specific to each type of equipment will pay dividends.

Sticking with our centrifugal pump example, anyone with access to STANDARD SAP reports can pull failure data up with a few clicks and trend the cost, frequency, impact, and resources required to repair unplanned failures on our centrifugal pumps.

More importantly, at a high level we can start identifying that over the last 4 months in 10 locations:

• 10 Impellers (Object Part)

• With Broken Blades (Damage Code)

• Caused by Corrosion (Cause Code)

• That We Replaced (Activity Code)

This is how we start driving out defects!

4. Connecting Supply Chain

Once we realize we have a problem with corrosion tearing up our impellers, it's time for Supply Chain to shine. Due to our impeccable planning and GREAT Material Master data, it's easy to quickly identify that all 10 corroded impellers came from:

• One manufacturer (Material Master)

• A single vendor (Purchase Order History)

THIS is why we do what we do. Now we have some great information to drive some decisions. Maybe we need a company spec change. Maybe the vendor needs to QC its parts. No matter the answer, we have the data to make a sound decision that is impactful to our business.

5. OK Great, This All Sounds Good. Where Do I Start?

At the end of the day, it shouldn't be a whipping to do this stuff. Just like most things in life, you get out what you put in. If you're overwhelmed on where to start, here's what I recommend:

1. Keep it Simple and focus on critical equipment first.
   
   

2. Make the Data Relevant
   
   

   • Establish a frequency that reviews failure codes and free text spend that drives desired behaviors.
     
     

3. Create Failure Code Catalogs that are specific to each equipment type you have.
   
   

   • Hint: ISO 14224 is a great place to start.
     
     

4. Utilize Technology to Enforce Processes and Procedures
   
   

   • Notifications — Identify failures and record failures. Consider a specific Notification Type for failures and configure SAP to require Failure Codes before the work order/notification is completed.
     
     

   • Work Orders — Plan the people, parts, and tools needed to perform work. Review Planned vs. Actual Spend to identify unplanned parts and people needed to complete the job.
     
     

5. Create and Understand Where Master Data Sits in SAP
   
   

   • Material Masters — What parts (Form, Fit, and Function) do I need? (OEM Part #)
     
     

   • Purchasing Info Records — Who can supply the materials with their price, delivery terms, and part #?
     
     

   • Source Lists (Optional) — Who we selected on a program level.
     
     

   • Bills of Materials (BOMs) — To reflect what was consumed on each work order.

Good luck out there! NOW GO ELIMINATE SOME DEFECTS!