16Proprietor_Role_Proprietorship PT1

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PROPRIETORSHIP AND THE ROLE OF THE PROPRIETOR

Albert K. Fletcher
CEO / PM Consultant
(Dataman System Consultancy)

INTRODUCTION

The Company is a legal device which permits a variable number of people to contribute assets which are then professionally managed to provide the market place. If the assets are good and the management competent, men, methods and acquired materials are combined to best utilize these assets – be they money, machines, natural resources, special knowledge or whatever. If well managed, the Company is competitive and satisfactorily achieves the purpose for which it was chartered.

While the owners of the Company do not manage the use of their assets, they do expect the managers they employ to preserve and improve any assets not intended to be consumable. This asset preservation activity (plus an important segment of the effort to improve and supplement it) is the reason for the very existence of the Maintenance Department.

In the natural course of events it becomes necessary to establish a formal relationship between those who must use the assets of the Company to accomplish its purposes and those who must maintain its assets to preserve and improve the owner’s equity. This relationship focuses in the concept of Proprietorship; the Proprietor’s activities relate to control of this environment in which asset preservation, restoration or improvement is conducted.

CONCEPT OF CONTROL

The theory of control in language appropriate to the control of the maintenance environment embodies the action to:

  1. Develop a plan covering what needs to be accomplished.

  2. Take the action that should accomplish the plan’s objectives.

  3. Measure the effect of the action taken.

  4. Compare the measured results with the plan’s objectives.

  5. Correct the action, if necessary, and repeat the cycle.

Details of techniques or further exploration of the concept of control may not be appropriate here. This may be discussed in subsequent edition of this article.

WHAT IS THE MAINTENANCE ENVIRONMENT?

The “maintenance environment” is the aggregate of the conditions which surround the performance of the maintenance work. Environment relates to determining what work needs be done, what equipment condition is needed and when. It does not relate to how the work is accomplished.

What it does do is to remove those interferences which the manufacturing or production activity impose on the accomplishment of the maintenance effort.

HOW IS THE ENVIRONMENT CONTROLLED?

Combining the foregoing in analyzing the role of the Proprietor means that:

  1. To develop the plan for maintaining equipment one must combine the knowledge of what Production has to do and what work the equipment needs with what Maintenance can do. This requires a full knowledge of Production’s problems, Maintenance’s problems and what each is able to do. Since Maintenance has the records and the technical arm (the Maintenance Engineer) which relates to equipment condition, it is apparent that plan development must be a cooperative effort. It is also apparent that Maintenance can
    be aware of plan elements which may be unknown to Production and must be transmitted to the Proprietor even when no direct request for information has been made.

  2. Getting the plan into a form which can be used is a matter of communicating all the relevant information, digesting and sorting it, defining the objectives and reducing it to useful terms. The long term plan obviously requires the Proprietor’s input although the discussion here may concentrate on the daily scheduling and the related plans for actual deployment of the maintenance forces.

  3. The Proprietor’s control action is a matter of identifying the work needed, getting the equipment ready for the work, and making sure the work can be done in a timely manner if Maintenance is to be efficient and effective. His control actions include the effort necessary to guarantee that the equipment needs no more maintenance than the minimum. He must control abuse.

  4. The Proprietor’s measuring and analysis step makes certain that the right job was done; that it was the most important job; and that it was done satisfactorily.
    Further, there is the proper balance of cost in time, money and lost production. He analyses to the certain that all interferences which he could have prevented were eliminated.

In summary, he balances the knowledge of what work Production must have done immediately, with the total work the equipment needs and the knowledge of the immediate capabilities of the Maintenance Department to identify what is best done now.

In the longer term the control efforts also assist in adopting those practices which will optimize efficiency of the Maintenance Department, analyze and approve long term schedules for Preventive and Major Maintenance and preserve those schedules. He will maximize the use of standing work orders and control to optimize records and data integrity.

(End Part 1 – To be continued)

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