Stable Maintenance: is your maintenance department a hidden factory?
Aart Willem de Wolf
Published at
Your products face cost competitiveness in the marketplace. Costs of internal maintenance resources appear to be higher than the costs of contracted resources. To satisfy demand, your asset utilization would have to be higher. Much higher. So, implementing stable maintenance could be one of your responses?
Without exception, each production facility needs maintenance on a regular basis. However, over the last couple of years we have seen huge differences in the way maintenance departments and tasks are organized.
It is pretty simple: Operations need Maintenance. And vice versa. Many of the unplanned deviations from production standards are related to maintenance issues. The maintenance organizations set up to resolve –or better yet, prevent- these issues, often are hidden factories within plants; management simply does not know what really happens.
Hidden factory
Ideally your maintenance department has all the required disciplines available. You run an in-house maintenance operation, with different employees responsible for different sections of your plant. Even if this is the case, let’s dive a little deeper and ask a few tough questions.
- What is the technical labour productivity?
- Where in your plant are the maintenance hours spent?
- What is the ratio between corrective and preventive maintenance?
- Are your preventive maintenance plans optimized?
- What is the wrench time?
- What are the five most commonly occurring issues?
Often, these questions cannot be answered readily. As a result, maintenance budgets have been growing for several years. And still, the actuals are higher than the budget. Budgets are regularly used to fund non-maintenance projects. Money is also spent to rent specific tools over and over again. Your poor maintenance manager is constantly struggling to provide explanations for budget overruns. And there appears to be little that can be done. Or is there?
Stable Maintenance
If you recognise this situation, it is important to implement a ‘Stable Maintenance’ program to connect the activities in the maintenance organization to your operations. If done in a transparent way, it would uncover the full potential of your hidden factory. Important KPIs to focus on are a reduction of downtime and performance losses.
First, you need to baseline the technical asset availability and maintenance costs. Then you are ready to (re-) structure the maintenance operating system. Your objective is to create efficient workflow execution to remediate issues, in real time. However, you need to keep the quantified impact on asset availability in mind. Be aware, a common pitfall is to focus on symptoms rather than on addressing root causes.
At this point you will experience how to run your maintenance process effectively, leveraging granular data at activity levels, rather than focusing on hitting budget numbers. Maintenance crews also experience your support to remove any issue that prevent them from doing their jobs.
Optimizing your maintenance strategy is next, as you would like to shift from corrective to predictive and preventive maintenance.
Slipstream effects
In addition to improved asset availability and labour productivity in maintenance, you will likely see a wide variety of additional improvements. These ‘slipstream effects’ could appear in areas like costs, compliance, risks, safety, employer engagement or asset care. Or in more specific areas like waste (from reduced start/stop losses), spare parts inventories, raw material, energy or illness rates.
The maintenance department could make a huge contribution if the market place dictates cost competiveness. And the best part of it all? All improvements in maintenance are sustainable. Well, that is, if you continue to dedicate time to ensure the new operating system runs as planned.
Lo Huls is Business Process Consultant at R&G Global Consultants.
