leadership for reliability

A 30 minute video featuring Winston Ledet, The Manufacturing Game
Originally presented at the Solutions 2.0 conference

Leaving my comfortable Operations home I ventured into the unknown land of Maintenance and Reliability. Upon entering this new land I discovered a completely new language that included terms like preventive maintenance and predictive maintenance. Early on even the differences between planning and scheduling were not obvious to me. People that I met along the way acted as a guide to me as I also became exposed to the strange culture of Japanese Total Productive Maintenance and MIT's computer modeling that uses System Dynamics. During this deep dive into learning, a new language was discovered in the stable domains of reactive, planned, precision, and world class and in addition defect elimination was discovered as the means to move up the domains. As new tools were created to achieve the precision domain we became aware that people already had more tools than they could use. I learned from a foreman that what was needed was a way of integrating initiatives into one program that people at the factory floor could implement easily. This challenge led to the development of a board game that could give everyone participating in it the same experiences that I had in my quest for understanding and implementing all of the best practices we found in the worldwide benchmark at DuPont. I reached the land of the precision domain at the Lima refinery where they recognized that reliability requires more than maintenance. Their invention of "Don't just fix it, Improve it" enabled them to reach the precision domain in an achievable way for western cultures. My travels continue.....

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