Improving maintenance productivity

Since I first published the article on the Maintenance Productivity Factor metric it has opened up a whole world of investigations and analysis in to issues preventing companies from achieving high MPF, highly productive maintenance workforces.

However, one of the key errors people make when trying to implement high productivity is to immediately go for the global "measure everything" approach. My experience has been that companies need to ease into regimes that measure and discuss productivity of the workforce, or it can be seen as a cost reduction exercise only.


Productivity within maintenance always boils down to our capability in three vital areas:

a) Our ability to perform high quality work. The goal here is always the same. Do the right maintenance, the right way, once.


b) Our ability to perform work without delays, relying greatly on our scheduling disciplines we have in place, and

c) Our capability to accurately estimate work, allowing us to identify the exact number and type of resources for any work we need to take care of.

Everything else pours into these three areas. If we don't have the right skills we have poor quality, if we don't have capacity scheduling we have high delays, if we have poor procedures we induce human error... and so on. There are a long list of things you need to attend to when improving productivity.

Maintenance people are often systemic thinkers, looking for ways to leverage their knowledge and experience across large asset bases.

This is a valid strategy and one I generally endorse completely. However, in the area of productivity management it can cause significant problems. Both in terms of generating distrust, as well as the high risk of measuring the  wrong areas. 


While the ultimate goal is to spread this thinking across the entire workforce, the initial approach should be focused on high value, regularly repeated tasks.

Shutdowns and turnaround are good opportunities for this.

An MPF audit or review conducted on a planned maintenance turnaround often has the following attributes.

a) Recording the estimates and actuals, accurately, of all tasks included within the MPF audit.

b) Working very closely with the craft personnel to accurately record and validate all work delays. (Hard to do during a turnaround and hard to do if people are not used to doing it.)

c) Agree guidelines for determining what Rework means for this company, taking into account rework causing failure and rework causing repeat repairs.

The recorded results will then allow you to produce MPF for each task, and for the overall turnaround. Giving the company a clear idea of how much they are actually paying for each hour worked not just for each hour where somebody was in attendance.

The results provide early initial guides as to how productivity can be significantly improved. I believe this should form a part of every turnaround where there is a goal of continuous improvement.