Today’s Gremlin – Don’t sweat the small stuff

Today’s Gremlin – Don’t sweat the small stuff, gets us into trouble by skipping details and steps, that are important, often to save time. Don’t sweat the small stuff cuts a lot of corners, and makes a lot of mistakes through that carelessness. Often, he’s trying to save time, meet a deadline, or satisfy operators who urgently need their equipment back.

Don’t sweat the small stuff, is another well intentioned but mis-guided Gremlin. Chances are that he’s cut those corners, skipped a step or two, or ignored details before. Perhaps he’s even got away with it in the past. Doing that in order to meet a near term goal is sometimes justified. But that trade-off is something the business should make, not the mechanic. This is one of the many gremlins we talked about when we introduced this series of articles.

Cutting corners can result in accidents!

There are many ways to cut corners in maintenance. Using the wrong tool can result in poor quality workmanship. Tightening without checking torque can leave parts too loose, or too tight. The wrong type of wrench can slip and even lead to injuries. Visual or straight-edge alignments are quicker but far inferior to proper reverse indicator or laser alignment techniques. Putting things back together exactly as they came apart can be just as wrong as it was the last time. What if someone didn’t check for the correct assembly procedure and made a mistake the last time? Many repeat failures occur because something was assembled incorrectly, time and again!

Corners get cut because of pressure to speed things up. Maintenance departments are often under-staffed, doing too little proactive work, and too much urgent repair work. Operational pressures to meet a delivery deadline, or quota, add pressure to speed up. Maintenance often responds by cutting corners. A little bit of time saved here and there can add up. No one makes mistakes intentionally, but they do happen. The risk of mistakes accumulating grows with that pressure to cut corners.

Go slow to go fast

Today’s Gremlin – Don’t sweat the small stuff, believes he can get away with little shortcuts. He really does want to satisfy his “customer” in operations and he honestly thinks that he’s good enough to work error free. Don’t blame him for being careless, unless he does it all the time. He’s usually responding to pressures from his supervisor, operations, or management, especially if they are watching what he does – looking over his shoulder. Many of us ignore the axiom, “go slow to go fast” because it is so seemingly contradictory.

Taking time to breathe deeply is healthy and relaxing. Most of us would “look before we leap” if we had to jump somewhere. Carpenters know to “measure twice, then cut once”. We all know that the tortoise beat the hare. Work done incorrectly, or without precision, is work that will lead to failures.

You can do it right, or you can do it over

Taking the time to do the job right ensures a quality job. It eliminates margins for error. While it cannot guarantee that the job is error free, it can certainly help. Statistically, 89% of all failure modes (i.e.: the ways things fail) show up as “infant mortality” failures. Mathematically they follow a hyper-exponential distribution. In plain language, it means they failed long before “their time”.

Human errors cause most of them!

Getting it right

We eliminate human error:
• by employing skilled people to do the work,
• by following procedures,
• by using precision maintenance practices,
• by using high quality parts and materials, and
• by leaving nothing to doubt.

If you’ve invested in procedures, practices, and standards of workmanship, then why not follow them?

Failing to do so, leaves the door open to Murphy’s Law.

In our consulting work we often run into the undesirable effects of “Don’t sweat the small stuff”. The consequences are usually obvious but the cause can be a bit hard to spot. It often shows up as failures repeating with the same underlying causes that are often ignored, if even investigated.

Today’s Gremlin – “Don’t sweat the small stuff” is macho and egotistical, and a nasty fellow that can really increase your costs and downtime.