Benchmarking your company

Within asset maintenance and management we continually see companies looking outside of their companies to try to find out what is leading practice within maintenance and asset management; what are the up and coming practices and technologies, and how they can get some rapid returns on their investment in maintenance and management initiatives.

However, there are often pockets of leading practice within their own organization. When commencing any form of best practice improvement program generated from within the company will always be easier to implement for two reasons.

A- They already are aligned with the thinking, culture and work practices within the company; and

B - As home grown initiatives they will face less resistance. (The not-invented-here syndrome is alive and well)

So here are some quick tips and steps that I have seen used or have used myself to find the leading practices within large scale companies.

Find out who the leading performers are!
This sounds obvious but you would be surprised just how many companies take off down the path of sharing leading practices without first working out who is likely to have them.

If your company has a number of sites, plants, or is a conglomerate of other related companies, then the first thing you want to do is benchmark them against each other.

Not as hard as it sounds, but try to focus more on data than opinion. (“Ten anecdotes does not data make” – Alan Mather, CEO of the office of the e-Envoy in the UK)

• What is their OEE like? Or other measure of asset performance Availability and MTBF spring to mind.

• What their throughput versus best achievable or design rates?

• What are their employee retention rates or employee turnover rates?

Then turn to some of the potential causes:

• Schedule compliance rates?

• Turnaround schedule compliance? (Late returns?)

• Level of training per employee per relevant discipline etcetera?

• Average delay times in executing work?

• Number of employees and so on..

There are many areas that would need to go into an initial review. Again DO NOT make it qualitative and always go for empirical data where this can be found.

• Give them a forum to discuss issues in

• Even with the best survey writers in the world the answers are not going to just fall out of a report. You are going to need to investigate. So why should you do all of this?

• The relevant people should be doing the investigating. That is – the people who are going to have to implement some of these leading practices in their own plants.

• So give them a place to have these discussions. A centre where they can sift through the results of the benchmark report, identify areas of leading performance and then determine the best way to investigate why this is so.

Give them direction on what to discuss, how to discuss them and the results required

With the initial benchmarks in place and the forum for discussion now on the move, there is a need to make sure that the participants have a specific direction. It has been my experience that when setting up a group such as this you need to give them direction.

This does not mean telling them to sit down and talk about it.

What it does mean is telling them “Big Plant Number 4 has shown a remarkable improvement over the past two years. We need to find out how they did this and how it can be transferred to others”

Or telling them “Small Plant Number 3 is obviously the worst performer in this area, we need to highlight why and try to work out how the rest of the plants can help them to rise out of this problem”

Providing specific direction will speed up the process of best practice adoption, as well as providing a sense of purpose for the assembled teams.

Provide the tools and mechanisms for spreading best practice adoption

So how do you actually spread the adoption of leading practices? This is not an easy thing to do even with the right intentions.

Your teams need to know that there are certain ways that they could go about this, but don’t restrict them or they will not be able to be innovative.

For example; give them the means to execute the following projects:

• Develop in house mentoring and cross training programs to strict guidelines for training quality and purpose

• Provide them with the capability to transfer people into other plants on a temporary basis to either a) train the people in the target plant, or b) learn about how operations or maintenance is carried out in the target plant

• Provide them the ability to change work processes and embed the new ones

• Give them the authority to make out purchase requisitions for new tooling, equipment or niche software (Subject to later approval)

There are many other options here, but you get the idea. Empower them to take decisions and give them the tools to do so.

Give them a positive incentive to do so

This is probably the most important element. When you are changing the way that a company does business you are coming up against all sorts of entrenched ways of thinking. Many people will have a vested interest or incentive to not change the way they are doing things.

Therefore, you need to give them positive incentive to change.

Tie results to bonuses, enable separate awards and recognition processes, provide for separate special payments for improvement, and provide additional training as a reward.

People respond to incentives, consciously or subconsciously, so if you are going to be successful in this enterprise then you will need to recognize this and take appropriate actions.