Maintenance and Reliability Improvement

The word “reliability” has many technical and academic definitions.  But at Bluefield, we’ve learned that reliability comes down to one question: are you in control of your assets, or are your assets in control of you?  In other words, is your maintenance operation proactive or reactive? 

People in a reactive maintenance environment are very busy. The phone constantly rings during the workday, and they get calls after hours and on the weekends. They stay late to finish up the day’s work, and many come in early to continue working without distractions. 

The worst part about it is that they deal with the same problems over and over. They never have time to plan because they run from one emergency breakdown to the next. 

Our approach to improving maintenance performance and reliability is based on the concept of proactive maintenance.  Proactive maintenance is simple at its core – it’s about identifying, understanding, and managing failure modes so that defects are identified and corrected early, or prevented altogether. 

In a proactive maintenance environment, your workforce – supported by effective maintenance tactics aligned to failure modes – is dedicated to maintaining standards that ensure components and fittings are tight, aligned and adjusted, properly lubricated, and clean.  In such an environment, the goal is not just to find defects but to extend asset life. When defects eventually do occur, they’re identified early and entered into the system immediately. This allows enough time to plan and schedule subsequent tasks and execute them in a controlled manner – not as an emergency breakdown. 

Bluefield works with you to evaluate and transform your maintenance performance, improving your asset reliability through effective maintenance tactics, practices, culture and work execution.  We’re proud to have helped many businesses via our flagship offering, the Bluefield Transformation Project.  It involves working with clients to develop a culture of proactive maintenance, reduced downtime, and costs associated with breakdowns.  Our specialists start by spending time in the field with maintainers and supervisors and analysing performance data. We then help create improvement actions and working agreements to build teamwork and drive accountability.  

Many of Bluefield’s asset management specialists have worked as tradespeople and maintenance leaders and can undertake reviews of your maintenance organisation. Their recommendations can help you identify and implement specific maintenance improvements, eg. improving handovers and pre-starts, optimising the way you conduct planned tasks, or obtaining the right staff to maintain your assets. 

We also apply our principle of proactive maintenance to reliability engineering.  Bluefield can assist you to investigate one-off or recurring failures using techniques like Root Cause Analysis – adapted to identify simple, fixable causes for defects and failures.  We can also assist with defect elimination projects, using our problem-solving tools and project management skills to find and remove technical and process-related defects.