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I started thinking about benchmarking the performance of paper machines the other day. Admittedly, this was after someone asked me about it, but nevertheless, I got to thinking about it in depth, mulling over my experiences.

The best benchmarking I have ever seen is this: benchmark yourself against running flat out, 24/7. This should always be the goal, nothing else should count. Why benchmark yourself against your competitors? Are you telling me your goal is to become just as good as (not better) than your competitors? Some goal! What if your competitors aren't very good?

I once worked in a facility that not only made paper, but had an adjoining printing plant. Of course, we had some industrial engineers on staff who were always working on efficiency in the printing plant. I had not been there very long when I asked one of these IE's about the efficiency of a certain press. The response? That press was running at 98%. Now, I walked by that press several times a day and I almost never saw it running. I dug deeper. That 98% was against "standard." My standard, that is when compared to running 24 hours per day, meant it was running about 70% of the time. Soon, not of my doing, the printing plant manager was replaced and most of the IE's were gone.

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It makes no difference if you are running a printing plant, paper machine or powerhouse, the standard to measure yourself against is operating continuously.

This may seem to be counter to our mantra around here about safety and maintenance. It is not. The real managers are figuring out how to do maintenance properly, operate safely, and push as close to running continuously as possible.

Take maintenance as a discussion point for a minute. I still see a lot of maintenance prep work, cleanup work and so forth that can be done while the paper machine is running, yet is being done while it is down. My view is that when the machine goes down for maintenance, the maintenance team should be standing by their respective jobs for the outage, wrenches in hand. This should not be the time they start strolling out of the maintenance shop pushing work kit carts for their projects of the day.

Work kit carts should be finished and double checked at least the day before the shutdown. And, by the way, do you have first aid kits on your work kit carts? You should have--on every one of them.

So...we started out talking about running flat out, 24/7 and ended up talking about work kit carts and safety. Why? Because they are inextricably linked. You can't come close to running at the maximum rate you can run until you have safety and maintenance under control in every aspect in which you use the words safety and maintenance.

There are many things which can be done to improve up time. If you haven't figured it out already, one of the key matters is to be ready for downtime. Then, work the downtime activities hard, very hard. One mill I know caters in meals and refreshments for everyone for each and every one of the outages. Why does this make sense? Because they can put the meals and refreshments right next to where the work is. It just might make sense to bring in "porta-potties" for the same reason. All he has to do is save 15 minutes of downtime and the meal is paid for.

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Should you be held responsible for maintenance? Maintenance is directly involved in asset valuation ... Check out the latest edition of Strategic & Financial Arguments.

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At the airport, the plane sitting at the gate is downtime. If you will notice, there is a large countdown clock outdoors, at the gate, counting down the time the plane has left until pushback. Why don't we put such clocks in paper machine halls? I wouldn't have them count down, however, I would have them count up. In other words, how long have we been down? That way you can always try to improve it--if it is a countdown clock, everyone will be lulled into thinking using all the time on the clock is acceptable.

For up time, have a plan for every kind of downtime you can have. If you are still running threading ropes, why don't you have hooks on the inside of the dryer frames so that each time you have to run a rope, you run two, or maybe even three. How much time will that save if you cut the time to actually run the rope on to once every three times a rope breaks?
I could go on all day. But let's get back to the original theme: your benchmark is 24/7. Nothing else matters.

What tricks have you learned to reduce downtime while safely and properly maintaining your machine? We'll give you a chance to tell us in our quiz this week which you may take here.

For safety this week, nothing I have said above takes away from the safety emphasis. In fact, you'll find the better you plan, the safer you will be.

Be safe and we will talk next week.

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