Characteristics of underperforming maintenance departments

- No formal process for identifying and defining work.

- Maintenance activities are not focused on equipment criticality.

- Effective planning does not always precede execution of work orders.

- Most available maintenance hours are not scheduled.

- Feedback on work quality is not provided.

- Operate in “firefighting” or the “squeakiest wheel” mode.

- Root causes of downtime issues are not well understood.

- Work completion is not followed by thorough close-out and analysis.

- CMMS is underutilized.  

- Constantly overwhelmed and behind with unmanageable work order backlogs.

- No maintenance-specific key performance indicators (KPIs) used to manage the department.