Some quick pointers to a maintenance organization in crisis

Have you ever noticed how companies with a very reactive maintenance environment tend to have very little, or no backlog of corrective work orders?

This is one of the "tells"companies have that can help you to make a quick assessment of their situation, and what you need to do about it.

Here are some others I use regularly.

Have a quick look over the maintenance practices in place for their hidden failures. protective devices ranging from stand by assets through to circuit breakers and PSV valves.

The sorts of things you are looking for here are: tasks more suited to operating assets, 50/50 rotations with no known justification for it, unexplainable frequencies for function tests, missing functional tests, and protective devices with no maintenance strategies at all.

Have a look at the weekly plan. Does it exist? Is it capacity scheduled? Is it in their system or in excel? (Shudder)

Look at their backlog. (Aside from the planned work order thing) Aside from a low level of corrective maintenance work orders you are also looking to find lists of routine work orders that were either not done or not closed off. (Nobody remembers anymore)

Before you got there they already knew they were reactive, but within two hours you now know:

a) They have no control at all over their short term maintenance planning. They can therefore have no good level of data flowing back for analysis, no real understanding of costs, and no way of driving continuous improvement aside from the old way of squeaky wheel maintenance.

b) Their maintenance strategies are at best causing them to have a high level of asset risk, potentially with safety and environmental consequences of failure. At worst their existing maintenance is actively contributing to the reactive state of affairs.

c) Their entire approach is not based on solving problems but on fixing them. Whether by design or by default, this is where they are.

Have a look around your own operations. You probably already know the answers to the questions here. I would be curious what you think...