What makes the Plant Wellness Way Different is its ability to deliver Holistic Solutions

Plant Wellness Way (PWW) operational excellence is vastly different to Lean and Six Sigma because it addresses business and operating risk across the entire life cycle.

Unlike Lean or Six Sigma, which tends to be used with a single problem focus; PWW is really about having business and operational processes that continually optimize productivity, minimise risk and generate maximum operating profits. It is a business risk management and business growth strategy and not just a operational problem solution.

The realisation that series arrangements were everywhere in our lives and businesses changed my life and career.

There is nothing that humanity does which does not involve series arrangements. We make our machines that way, we do our work that way and we build our businesses that way. No wonder we have problems—it is a nearly impossible to have long series arrangements that cannot fail in some way. That is why I like Lean so much—it has answers to reduce the chance of problems in series arrangement (Error Proofing, Hoshin Planning, Value Stream Mapping i.e. process waste removal, TPM, and others).

Because Toyota created Lean methods it tells me that they saw the same problem in the 1960/70’s and have been working on preventing it ever since. But it requires a mindset change in people and the development of new methods and skills (Hence why most companies find it difficult to adopt and sustain Lean. Once you have habits, even if they are bad, they are hard to break. It is far better to get good habits at the start than try and change bad habits into good habits later).

If you do not ‘see’ that series arrangements are everywhere, and you have to minimise the chance of things going wrong anywhere in the series, then life and work is full of problems that keep coming back again and again. (Unfortunately I now look at a thing and immediately start working out how to improve the odds of it going right. It is not good for a Consultant to tell his Customer that they – the Client – does not know what they are doing.)

The series arrangement problem is also why I began looking for new answers and came up with PWW for business system reliability growth and ACE to create work task quality assurance. Neither the PWW Operational Excellence methodology or ACE work quality assurance methodology contains new concepts. Their power is that when you commit to using them they force you to rapidly adopt and apply better practices in your business. By using better practices you then get better results. PWW and ACE instil the correct necessary discipline and behaviours into companies that create reliability, safety and minimise operating costs and losses.

PWW is a methodology that views the asset life cycle as holistic. It means each constituent of Wellness is everywhere and always active. Just like personal wellness needs all the elements (Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual) working together all the time to build the mental health and physical fitness that puts you in a position to have a healthy, happy and fruitful life.

To say that equipment reliability is only due to failure elimination that requires Capital to address (both financial and human capital), and not include such work practices as TPM and system improvements through the use of ACE, does not provide the full scope of what is really necessary to get high equipment reliability.

This methodology will maximize the reliability of your enterprise using principles of system reliability, lean optimization, ACE 3T Quality Management System and precision maintenance. These principles are viewed as interrelated as opposed to separable. The objective of PWW is not to maintain the functionality of the overall system while allowing certain components to fail, nor to repair/replace components whose failure is predicted. Instead, the intent is to design, construct, operate and maintain an asset so that failure does not occur. World class organizations do not accept things going wrong. They proactively focus on preventing problems.

You use PWW to get down to the least scope of work that is necessary to surely create world class operational excellence. Organizations use PWW to refine what is done in their operations down to the essence of what causes high reliability and uptime.

Lean Six Sigma does not make its users into New Toyotas. To think that simply adopting what Toyota does will make you equal to Toyota is a falsehood. There is already plenty of evidence of that in those companies that are supposedly Lean but cannot reach and sustain the implied performance. Adopting Lean Six Sigma alone cannot make you world class. The late quality guru, W. Edwards Deming, never liked Six Sigma because he saw that it was point-focused and not system-focused. You need to build an error proof system, not reduce errors from selected processes.

PWW is a methodology which combines best operations, maintenance and reliability practises into a holistic system of working, that if followed, will make industrial operations and their machines hugely reliable.

PWW is a standardised, regimented way to put into a company the best practises to look after plant, equipment and machines properly. It is a discipline that people will need to use masterly and follow strictly; just like Lean. But there is no other way to guarantee operational excellence performance.

Author: Mike Sondalini