Technology is not a requirement. Buy in (motivation) is not a requirement either. Some operators are motivated to do a good job so if they feel that the various little "tweaks" that most of them do to a machine actually makes a difference or impact and reflects on how they are viewed, they're going to do it. The trick though there is the feedback...the motivation. If the operator is highly silo'ed then your only feedback is when the technician comes by to work on the machine and that little 5 minutes of interaction between the operator and the technician. It's not much but there is a huge difference in response if the technician talks to the operator like they're doing a good job and maybe points out a couple tips or ideas and acts genuinely interested in helping solve the problem that they're there to fix, perhaps even involving the operator in the repair. Many companies simply turn break downs into break time for operators so there is in many companies a built in incentive to not maintain or even run a machine properly. If when a breakdown occurs operators get redirected to less desirable tasks (clean up) or are given a choice between a relatively menial task and supporting the mechanic, there's an incentive there to keep the machine running and/or report problems before they shut it down...again, IF there is feedback. If the maintenance department has to schedule work to be done and it's a major undertaking with days in advance to schedule someone to come out and discuss what's going on for 5 minutes as it often is in today's maintenance planning systems that claim to have everything scheduled out a week or two in advance, ODR really isn't going to be well supported.
Not all operators respond to this. The key though is looking at your motivational structure. So hopefully if you do so you can praise the leaders and support them at every step and drag the stragglers along who will moan that they have more to do than they used to but so be it.
Also, want to know what one of the dumbest moves in terms of ODR that you can do is, one done by a Fortune 100 company? Give responsibility and budgeting over to the production department for maintenance. Change ODR from "Operator" to "Operations".. The theory and this goes to the core of ODR on a large scale is then production is motivated to maintain a proper balance between maintaining their equipment and production. The ancient production vs. maintenance scheduling fights go away, and production is motivated to work in the lowest cost manner which means spending a lot more money on maintenance. The reality is that production managers who live by much shorter time scales than maintenance will run everything to failure. They cut every corner they can and short change the maintenance budget at every opportunity. The reason is simple. Their primary responsibility is still production. So given a choice between a maintenance goal X and a production goal Y, guess which one they pick even if it is detrimental to the overall goal (OEE)? Yep, they pick Y almost every time. This is the case of I can tighten the packing on the pump every day or keep my operator making widgets. Or I can stop and change the packing in 10 minutes at a minimal cost or keep production running. Or I can change the bearing assembly and avoid hefty downtime and costs or keep running. Or I can change the motor that was destroyed, front door, back door, impeller, bearing assembly, lantern rings, packing and pray that the shell wasn't damaged when the impeller flew apart and ran into it now that I've completely run a pump into the ground taking a full day if not more and thousands of dollars of parts because the pump locked up. Yep, this is the end result of ODR taken to the point of relinquishing total control to production, the direct opposite of what is intended. Now the theory says that operations would never make these decisions because that runs counter to performance (most production for the least cost) but it denies the fact that production managers live in the here and now and basically barely plan past the end of the day whereas maintenance managers live day by day and think a week or two ahead. Short sightedness becomes just as pervasive as the human desire to charge in on th white horses and save the day which turn maintenance departments into pure fire fighting operations.
Done right, an example of ODR that I was the maintenance manager at works like this. So this is a small 28 man operation,. Production consists of basically 2 stages, wet and dry. Dry is the bottle neck. Wet can run for 3 days and build up a 5 day stockpile. Operators are given a choice between a 36 hour week (12 hour shifts) and working one or two extra days doing maintenance to get their 40+ hours. Overtime is based on weekly hours, not daily. So 3 days out of the week the maintenance department has a head count of 5 and 2 days out of the week it swells to around 10. When equipment goes down operators either work on fixing it, doing some other task (typically shoveling or other cleaning tasks), or go home. ODR was highly successful here.
From a business perspective, this is a tale of two plants nearly equal in size. They both chugged along turning out about 10,000 tons per week of product and fought over customers. When the recession (2001) hit, both went down to 5,000 tons per week. Layoffs happened. The maintenance crew in plant A was 5 with ODR enhancing it. The maintenance crew in plant B was 13. Production was smooth and customer focused in plant A. Production was all over the place and they had constant breakdowns and quality problems in plant B. Let's just say the focus was on their union membership, not customers. 2 years went by and plant A was up to 10,000 tons per week while plant B was at 5,000 tons per week. Plant A had to add a couple more operators on to keep up while plant B laid a couple more off. Another year went by and Plant A was at 15,000 tons per week while things continued to go horribly bad for plant B. For instance they contaminated the production line of their largest customer for weeks due to quality problems (and questioning the QC reports they were getting). Temporarily the customer pulled out and went over to plant A. Plant B of course had to get this under control so they did the right thing. Corporate cut a refund check for the bad product, no questions asked. Then 6 weeks later sent a salesman over to discuss signing up the customer for a long term contract with a price increase. When asked about what they did to fix the quality control problem the answer was basically nothing. Needless to say the customer and many more like them never went back. A year later Plant A was up to 20,000 tons per week of production and plant B closed the doors. I can tell you from experience that the division between maintenance and production was very, very slim. Operators were just as motivated to see their equipment well maintained as mechanics were to see production do well. Without ODR this story would have been very, very different in the outcome.