When improving maintenance effectiveness, what often separates the champions from the underperformer is the little things done well. Those organizations that have attained maintenance excellence understand that underperformance typically stems from two difficult truths:
1. Maintenance effectiveness is difficult to measure.
2. Achieving maintenance excellence requires a consistent, disciplined methodology that will not happen on its own.
MEASUREMENT
Management pioneer Peter Drucker asserts that “what gets measured gets managed.” Maintenance performance, unfortunately, is not easy to measure, and many organizations fail to effectively manage maintenance as a result.
Maintenance leaders seem to always be in need of more people, more time, better cooperation from operations and better capital equipment. Without good performance measurement, nobody really knows whether additional resources are necessary or not.
Many organizations rely only on numbers like uptime and total maintenance costs to gauge effectiveness. Yet, these numbers are too far-removed from actual performance effectiveness to really drive good managerial decisions.
Where better metrics are in place, we often find that uptime and total maintenance costs have fallen out of use because the numbers are inaccurate, management does not have confidence in them or they only represent part of the picture.
Maintenance effectiveness requires more than just earnest effort. It requires a well-designed set of processes and procedures that together make up a consistent system for managing the entire maintenance function.
Such a system doesn’t emerge spontaneously. It must be created and implemented with both the big picture and the front-line specifics in mind. Maintenance requires a tailored approach and a set of tools and processes to take the guesswork out of performance management.
STARTER QUESTIONS
A good understanding of your organization's maintenance effectiveness starts with answers to questions like these:
- Do you have a well-functioning work order system with an appropriate backlog?
- Are your maintenance needs well-matched with your maintenance resources each day?
- Do you know your performance on “controllable” metrics such as:
+ Percent of work orders completed as scheduled.
+ Percent of work orders initiated by preventive maintenance (PM) routines versus production.
+ The rate of scheduled PM completion.
+ Schedule attainment.
+ Startup efficiency.
- Do your service writers/planners all utilize the same tools and task time targets? Do the plans from all service writers/planners look identical in terms of format and content?
- Do you have good information about which of your assets is most and least reliable?
- Do you get full value out of your CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management
System), or are there a number of "work around" spreadsheets and other tools in
place used to keep things on track?
Organizations with world-class maintenance effectiveness have systems and processes in place to bring answers to these and other questions every day. Such organizations, however, are the exception rather than the rule. Most organizations get lost along the path to maintenance effectiveness for several common reasons.
TYPICAL MISSTEPS
Most organizations that we encounter have fallen into one or more of the following
common traps while trying to get their maintenance management under control:
- The patchwork approach – Though aware of their needs, many organizations pursue a piecemeal strategy, attempting to build and implement just one process or component at a time. This type of approach takes far too long, and the initiative for improvement
gets lost in the shuffle of daily demands.
- The paperwork monster – Good systems require information capture, but in the attempt to tackle their execution challenges, they create burdensome and unsustainable
paperwork processes. The results can be very counterproductive.
Employees begin to associate attempts at performance management with wasteful administrative and paperwork tasks, and the real business of managing for performance is stymied.
- The Ivory Tower initiative – Many organizations try to attack their maintenance challenges without direct, deliberate involvement from front-line employees. The most effective programs succeed precisely because they unlock the potential of those on the shop floor.
Leaving these workers out of the design and implementation of performance management programs most often leads to frustration and less than optimal adoption of the new processes.
- Perfection or nothing – In the attempt to fix parts of the process, the effort grows and grows so that all things are on the table and, in the end, little gets accomplished. The best organizations avoid these problems on their path to maintenance excellence because they:
- Develop their performance management program as one comprehensive initiative.
- Build processes that function without overwhelming administrative requirements.
- Involve employees at all levels.
- Don't let perfection prevent progress.
DISTINCT PROCESS TYPES
A system for managing maintenance includes two distinct types of processes: the maintenance business process and the maintenance management process.
The maintenance business process defines all of the steps that make up what maintenance personnel will do. It starts with initial identification of a maintenance item that needs to be completed and follows the work flow all the way through work order closure and follow-up analysis.
There are six basic steps in a good maintenance business process:
1. Identify – Work requests follow a specific process for review and approval. Thorough visual inspections and preventive maintenance routines are in place to identify machine center issues.
2. Plan – The planning function is centralized and used daily for all work to be performed. Necessary parts, tools and other resources are defined for each work item. Time estimates accompany each item and are central to the planning effort.
3. Schedule and assign – 100 percent of available maintenance hours are assigned. Work items are formally prioritized. Each technician has responsibility for a specific schedule of work items. Skills, certifications and individual expertise are matched with specific work items.
4. Execute – Job kitting practices are commonplace. Job completion includes gathering information about time use, asset condition and any additional work required.
5. Job sign-off – Maintenance personnel sign off on completed work items and note if additional required work is identified.
6. Work order closure and analysis – Asset history is tracked and incorporated into preventive maintenance practices. Operations staff are consulted to ensure that the issue that they had with the equipment has been resolved.
COMPREHENSIVE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
The best maintenance groups also know that they can’t work to improve performance unless they know how well they’re performing in the first place – not every year or every quarter, but every day. Once they have established the kind of business processes previously described, world-class maintenance organizations complete the picture by developing and implementing comprehensive management systems that:
- Pinpoint the most meaningful specific, measurable and controllable activities for which the organization is responsible.
- Measure and report performance in these activities.
- Facilitate structured action planning focused on solving problems.
- Evaluate daily things like schedule compliance, work quality, planning effectiveness, parts availability, breakdown work, rework volume and start-up effectiveness, rather than just uptime and cost.
Of course, having informed discussions about these types of controllable indicators requires well-structured measurement and reporting processes, along with a regimen of meetings that are thorough without being too cumbersome.
UNDERPERFORMANCE
Underperforming maintenance organizations typically have little or no structured management systems. In many cases, the lack of management system components stems from an absence of good business processes. You can’t evaluate schedule compliance if there’s no schedule, and you can’t report on planning effectiveness if there’s no planning program.
Underperforming maintenance groups have no way of knowing how well they’re doing at the most important activities, and the story inevitably ends there.
With the right systems, processes and tools in place for both work management and performance management, world-class maintenance organizations can turn their attention to the final ingredient that promotes continuous performance improvement: skill development. Great maintenance organizations know which people need training and education in each of the critical work skills required.
Like the other aspects of their work, these organizations formalize this type of skill development into training and education plans, and then continually evaluate their own performance in adhering to these plans.
Computer proficiency to conflict resolution, leadership tactics to time management and appropriate skill development for all levels of the maintenance organization is a hallmark of high-performing organizations.
Robert Landau is a principal with Pöyry Management Consulting (www.poyry.us), an international consulting and engineering company that serves the industrial and energy industries. Pöyry delivers management consulting and engineering services, underpinned by strong project implementation capabilities and expertise. The company’s Operational Excellence practice has saved their numerous clients significant money through improved execution. Pöyry has an extensive local office network employing about 5,000 experts.
