Plant Reliability Rollout – the Story of Mobile

I was a corporate industrial engineer at Armstrong World Industries. From time to time, I was given projects that impacted all facilities around the world. John, our manufacturing VP, was hired from an outside company. He was determined to have an accurate measure of performance, to compare facilities, and identify the highest value opportunities for improvement and investment.

John developed a metric he called Plant Reliability. I was tasked to help ensure Plant Reliability (PR) was properly calculated and implemented everywhere we made ceiling tiles. Working with the IT department, we were able to capture the components of PR automatically and set baselines for the many different products produced globally.

John wasn’t satisfied with just creating the metric. He wanted to change the culture around PR, so people could see how they could impact it in a positive way. He wanted the whole organization talking about and strategizing around Plant Reliability. John was trying to move us to a culture of performance and accountability. He was determined to do it one leader at a time.

After working with each plant’s staff and measuring Plant Reliability for a few months, John was confident it was correct and there was a positive correlation between PR and profitability at the facility level. Now it was time to assess whether the leadership teams were utilizing PR in a way that engaged their employees. John’s vision was that anyone in the facility should be able to connect their work to the overall metric so they could understand how they impacted it and then adjust their actions to drive PR in a positive way.

John took me with him on a tour of Armstrong’s North American facilities to perform a Plant Reliability audit. At each facility, we planned to meet with the leadership team, production operators, mechanics, electricians, and other staff. We wanted to find out how well they understood Plant Reliability and if it was being used to drive performance and accountability.

Our first stop was Mobile, Alabama. Early in the morning, we met with the leadership team. They regaled us with graphs and charts, showing us how Plant Reliability was on a positive trajectory. They told us how everyone in the plant was aligned and engaged in their role to increase PR. After the presentation (dog and pony show), we took a walk through the facility with the Plant Manager.

We stopped at a production line, where an operator was struggling with a downtime issue. He had just called for assistance. John asked him what the problem was that he was dealing with.

“Oh, this equipment always shuts down intermittently. I just called the electrician to reset the control systems,” he said. He told us he experienced shutdowns like this three or four times a week.

John asked him if he had heard about Plant Reliability. The operator said he had heard the term used in crew meetings, but little elsewhere. He was then asked if he could describe what the term meant. He said, “I think it’s a measure of performance, but I’m not sure how it’s calculated. I don’t really understand it.”

John held his composure and thanked the operator and asked him if there was anything we could do to help. We were told no, and we walked on. The Plant Manager excused himself and walked to a meeting.

Five minutes later, we noticed an electrician sitting in a small office with his feet on a desk. We walked in, introduced ourselves, and asked his name and what he did at the plant. He told us his name was James and he did a little bit of everything. Right now, he was trying to diagnose the intermittent breakdown we had observed earlier. John said that it didn’t seem like he was too urgent about it, with his feet up on the desk.

“Well,” James told us, “Them operators aren’t too smart, and it takes some strong thinking to figure out these problems.” The anger was welling up in John as he wrote something in a notepad. I asked the electrician if he could tell us anything about Plant Reliability. He said, “That’s for the suits. Not for us real workers. It’s not important. What is important is making the line run.” With that, John stormed off and wrote more notes in his notepad.

Something bad was coming. We walked to the Plant Manager’s office. John told me to wait outside. I heard the yelling and scolding. It sounded one sided.

After we left the plant, I drove us to a Waffle House for dinner. John was a big fan of their simple Southern menu. While we ate, John told me what had happened and what made him so upset. “Plant Reliability isn’t for the leaders, it’s for everyone. We’re trying to help people do the right thing every day and if we withhold information from them, they won’t know what the right thing is.”

From that moment, I knew I needed to help plant leaders truly understand PR and how they could communicate and align their organizations around it. I created separate meetings with plant leaders and guided them through this journey, acting as a liaison and buffer from John. Follow-up visits went much better and I would soon get the opportunity to apply what I learned when I was promoted to Operations Manager at the St. Helens plant.