Captured by Data Part 5

by Mr. Mather
Posted 8-1-06

Measurement of maintenance performance

Measurement is worth mentioning within this paper because the data that will be generated from applying an effective maintenance program will allow for companies to look further at how their program is functioning than they previously could. It is another example of the fundamental importance of effective maintenance policies.
When applying measurement programs to asset management or maintenance, companies generally look directly to direct performance measures. These are things such as failure rates, mean time to repair, availability, quality and a whole list of other measures of how a machine is operating at any given time. (And often trended to give a view of improvement or deterioration)
These are perfectly reasonable measures and they give a company a snapshot of how a machine is performing to the standards that have been set for it. Regardless of how these measures are selected or generated, they are almost always lagging indicators. That is, they are indicators that tell you how your machine is performing after the fact.

Yet the data collected through establishing an effective maintenance program allows the company to generate a range of leading indicators. Measures that lead performance, or tell you that something is likely to begin to perform badly before it actually does.
The diagram in Figure 7 depicts the relative impact of these areas of leading indicators, and the smaller impact of performance measures established in the traditional lagging approaches. These are the key areas of the RCM Scorecard, a tool first published in the book, The Maintenance Scorecard, and the subject of a separate article in this area.
However, the basic thrust of the RCM scorecard is to allow companies to measure the effectiveness of their maintenance policy initiatives. Through applying measures to the data captured in the course of doing the day-to-day work, RCM Analysts are able to establish things such as:

1. Is it more cost-effective to manage the asset, over its whole-of-life profile, or not? (Leading to incorrect whole-of-life management, not just costs)
2. Was the task really more cost effective than the estimates of failure? (Leading to incorrect whole-of-life costs)
3. Was the cost of failure really more cost effective than the estimated costs of the maintenance policy? (Leading to incorrect whole-of-life costs)
4. Are the tasks actually predicting or preventing failures?
5. What is the increase in risk due to late performance of DTive tasks? (Leading to higher than acceptable levels of risk exposure)
6. What is the increase in risk due to late performance of PRes or PRep tasks? (Leading to higher than acceptable levels of risk exposure)
7. What is the increase in risk due to late performance of PTive tasks? (Leading to higher than acceptable levels of risk exposure)

The actual measures contained within The RCM Scorecard are detailed fully within the book. It provides, arguably, a stronger level of benefit to a company than direct measures because it allows them to tap into the results of mainly leading indicators, thus heading off poor performance before it appears on the management report. Regardless of the actual measures used, the point remains that this is only possible due to the creation, in the first instance, of the effective maintenance program.

We began this paper discussing the three key drivers of maintenance that EAM systems often target. Without considering the different operating environments of different companies, these do cover the basic drivers of most maintenance departments.

1. To develop a maintenance policy designed to minimize the total cost of managing and operating the assets throughout its entire life cycle for a given level of performance and risk.
2. Obtain maximum efficiency out of the resources used to carry out the maintenance policy, driving unit costs further towards the optimum level.
3. To steadily build the asset data portfolio to allow future decisions regarding the asset base with increasing levels of confidence.

It could be argued that methods based in RCM style thinking alone could satisfy all three of these primary drivers of maintenance management. But the business processes that would be required to do so would be onerous and would restrict the ability of the company to manipulate and analyze data effectively. As well as being a burden to those trying to manage the maintenance workload.
It could also be argued that implementing EAM or CMMS, without implementing a parallel, or leading, initiative to create an effective maintenance policies will produce limited results, possibly exacerbate the current situation by allowing the company to perform incorrect work efficiently. And potentially create an environment where the assets are being managed in a way that is contrary to principles of responsible asset stewardship.
This line of thinking can lead to only one conclusion. The development of effective maintenance policies is the foremost consideration for modern asset managers. When done correctly it provides the base for business processes, inventory management techniques and methods, software configurations and selection, and the numbers and skill requirements of labor.
Aside from these tactical advantages, it also offers the strategic advantages of improving the whole-of-life management and understanding of the physical asset base, and the way that it is monitored and managed through performance measures. However, once the program is created, attempting to manage the asset base without leveraging off the advances in modern maintenance software deprives the organization of a tremendous opportunity for improvement.
This viewpoint is not new, nor is it particularly complex. It is a common sense approach and is an extension of the basic way that maintenance managers acted prior to discovering technology and being drawn down the path of increasing functionality, graphing, mobile devices and other gadgetry. It just seems to have been lost in the maze of tools that we are faced with today!
Of particular importance in this paper is the growing role of the RCM Analyst. Once a separated facilitator or a sole analyst, the RCM Analyst is a role that is by necessity becoming a lot broader. Covering a range of additional areas of expertise. A 20th century facilitator was generally driven to apply a team-based method and to complete the analyses. A 21st century Analyst is generally the owner of the program for their area or region. They are responsible for its upkeep, implementation, for ensuring that it is effective, for establishing the links to whole-of-life costing, and for capturing the knowledge of the organization through the application of the method in a flexible fashion. A new role for a new set of challenges!