Why Are There Few Maintenance AND Reliability Executives?

I got this question from Marc Laplante of Meridium and it is an excellent question.

I have a contact on LinkedIn who has been wondering if there are any executives out there who actually have Maintenance and/or Reliability in their title. I know of a few. Many reliability and maintenance people lament the fact that there isn't a place at the executive table for maintenance and reliability.


I would like to know if you have an opinion on this and if you've written anything on this subject?

The short answer is, I don't know.  Here are my thoughts on why it may be.

The Concepts are Simple, Execution is Hard
Maintenance is pretty straight forward.  Best practices have been around for 50 - 100 years, everybody understands what they should be doing.   The only problem is the equipment won't cooperate, it keeps breaking.  If you can get past that problem, the operators won't cooperate, they keep breaking the equipment.  If you can cure those problems, all the excitement goes out of maintenance, it's boring, your favorite maintenance guy can't rush in to save the day and be the hero, he becomes like the accountant, a bookish indvidual with glasses who sits around planning all day.  Maintenance fades into the background and gets marginalized. 
 
Reliability is a bit newer and a bit more difficult.  First of all there is the delayed effect.  I like to draw parallels between safety and reliability because at their core, they are similar.  Safety is keeping people out of harm,s way.  Reliability is keeping equipment out of harm's way.  The tools are similar, both are based on risk, good planning, good design, and thinking about things before you do them.  There is one big difference though.  When you get hurt, you know it immediately.  You feel pain, you see blood. Cause and effect happen close together.  When you injure your equipment it may not show up for some time but it still shows up as increased maintenance, early failure.  In the case of reliability, the cause is often separated in time from the effect.   This makes it difficult for people to see the immediate impact of their actions.  It makes it harder to figure out the cause sometimes.   It makes it easy for one person to damage the equipment and be rewarded while sandbagging some unknown person in the future who suffers the consequence and is punished.
 
Reliability is also fairly new.  Most of the concepts come are about 60 years old.  Deming and Juran were the early pioneers and are virtually unknown outside a few specialized communities in manufacting in their home country, the USA.  They are national heroes in Japan.  These two guys along with the dedication and hard work of the Japanese people are responsible for the excellent quality products we get today from Japan and from plants that emulate them in other parts of the world, including here in the USA.  In addition to the concepts being fairly new (the company I work for is 125 years old as a frame of reference).  In addition to being new, some of the tools are mathematically intensive, so we have only had the computing capacity to do reliability analysis on a large scale, cheaply, for the past 15 - 20 years.
 
Execution is tough, because tough decisions have to be made to move out of the reactive realm.  First you have to spend some time up front understanding your equipment before your reliability efforts take hold.  Many companies are focused on last month, last quarter, last year and this month, next month, next quarter and this year.  This is especially true for public companies.  Even if you do the quickest things like Operator Care and implementing a risk framework for decision making, it still takes 6 - 12 months for it to pay back and it does not undue all the damage that is already done to the equipment.   It takes several years for the damages/defects to work their way out of the system.  It also takes a long time to get the equipment life planning done (RCM, FMEA, etc) which makes reliability sustainable.  It takes enlightened leadership, commitment and company support over an extended time to get all the benefits from a reliability program.
 
The Generation Gap
Most maintenance executives today grew up before the computing power was around and never were reliability engineers.   When I started working in the oil industry in the late 1980's, the term reliability engineer was synonomous with rotating equipment engineer and this is still true in many companies.  So many maintenance executives today can talk about it but have never done it and don't truly understand it. (My apologies to my peers whom I may have offended with that comment.  It's my opinion, based on my experience.)   It is only now that younger people who were reliability engineers in the 90's are moving into those more senior management positions.
 
High Performers
Many good companies promote high performers quickly.  Even in the best companies, these people are identified early and rapidly promoted to senior manager levels in 10 - 15 years rotating quickly through a lot of jobs across the business.  These people are usually smart and have good leadership skills and they lack experience because they moved so quickly.  In many companies, if high performers do not make mistakes, they continue to move up.  In these companies, once you recognize you are a high performer, you tend not to rock the boat so you don't get stuck halfway up the ladder (how's that for a mixed metaphor?).  These are not usually the people who will lead your change effort because it requires them to stick their neck out.  Because they are moving fast and feel they need to make an impact to move up, these are often the people who kill a young reliability program through some cost cutting or personnel reduction effort before the organization is ready for it.  They need results now to show they are worthy.   Few companies reward leaders for coming in and following the existing processes and keeping things on track.  Managers have to make an impact to prove their worth.
 
Reliability Guys are Technical Guys
Reliability guys are usually technical guys.  Being a technical guy myself, I will say that a large majority of technical guys, including me, are weak on people skills.  We're bad communicators. We get mad at people when they can't understand what we are talking about. We are easily frustrated with stupid policies, rules, regulations and hard headed people that don't want to change the way they work.   So we are often labeled as complainers and not listened to.  We often have a hard time speaking the language of management (money, if you were wondering).  We don't put our reasons for doing things in monetary terms for management.  It's hard for us to quantify.  My point in saying all this, is a lot of technical guys get relegated to a technical track and never move into management.  Many don't want to.  I would be the same had the Navy not spent a lot of time and money teaching me and developing my leadership skills.  One of the few things of value I took away from my MBA education was a study done by Harvard Business School.  I don't remeber the name of the study or who did it but the study reviewed successful executives across a range of industries and rated them on Technical Skills and Political Skills.   Of these top exeutives about 70% had excellent Political Skills and poor Technical Skills, 20% had excellent Technical Skills and poor Political Skills, and only about 10% were good at both (think Jack Welch here).
 
Top Leadership
At most companies, the top leadership positions seldom come from the engineering ranks. More often top leaders come from Marketing, Production, Supply, or Finance.  This will vary somewhat by industry but you get the idea.  These people only look at maintenance as a necessary expense and a large one at that.  They are only interested in seeing it go down as a % of revenue.  They don't see maintenance as a valuable contributor to company profitability.  They see it as something we have to do to stay in business, a necessary evil.
 
The Frederick Taylor - Top Down, People are Machines Business Model
Last but not least, in the USA we were blessed that World War II was not fought on our soil.  We built up our manufacturing base and supplied the world because everybody else's manufacturing was destroyed during that war.  Unfortunately that blessing has turned into a curse in the last 30 years as everybody else built new, modern factories and our manufacturing base in the US eroded to almost nothing.  Part of this was complacency and part of this is we were working on the outdated thinking of Fredrick Taylor who's ideas left us with a system where management makes all the decisions and the workers are treated like automatons (robots) with no brains and no skin in the game.  The US is still operating on this model while the much of the rest of the world is using a model more like Japan (thanks to Deming and Juran).  Engaging the entire knowledge of the workforce and knocking down silo's is the best way to get the entire workforce giving 100% effort.   But this topic is probably worth a whole other blog entry.
 
 
How do we change things?
Those of us who see it clearly must try to lead the way and convince others.  I don't know of any other way.  We have to demonstrate the value of our point of view by delivering results.  We have to try to educate our peers.  We have to educate younger people coming into the workforce.  We have to share our knowledge.  The marketplace will help us as China and India and the fairly new European Union start to exert more influence in the world and take the leadership reigns from the US, we need to stay in the game and be a player rather than fading into the background like England did.