The Dangers of "Basic Maintenance"

Basic maintenance is the latest variant of the "back to basics" meme that sweeps through maintenance every 5 - 10 years.

It sounds innocuous enough, and who would argue about setting proper lubrication schedules and cleaning regimes right?

Yet in the RCM analyses that we regularly perform this belief in basic maintenance is one of the largest contributors to over-maintenance, inefficient use of resources, and in some cases increases in downtime and risk of failure

Maintenance induced failure

We are more dependent on machinery than at any time in the recent past. Today, when asset maintainers hear of issues like the Buncefield explosion or the BP Deepwater Horizon incident we realize that it is virtually an impossibility that asset failure, for whatever reason, is part of the cause somewhere.

And as this trend continues it is also inevitable that we will be hearing more about so called Maintenance Induced failure. (machines require maintenance, more machines means more requirement for maintenance, ergo more likelihood of maintenance error)

I wanted to spend some time running through some of the possible causes of maintenance error, and hopefully they will help you to both recognize them, and to act on them.

Is your maintenance operation in trouble?

I have posted on this before, but I think it is worth while making the point again. There are several obvious signs when a maintenance organisation is in trouble.

I think this is important to review because it is often hard to see the wood for the trees when you are dealing with it every day.

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.

Condition monitoring or condition assessment?

Prior to the end of last century I had worked exclusively in maintenance and reliability areas, focusing heavily on short life asset industries within the Oil and Gas, petrochemical and Mining sectors.

When I finally hit the utilities and infrastructure sectors I though that all the principles would be immediately transferable. This seemed logical. I knew that the scientific justification for maintenance was the second law of thermodynamics, and that our primary goal was managing the failure process based on consequences.

Being busy ain't what is used to be...

If you need something done urgently give it to a busy man...

Remember that saying? Well I don't think it's true any more. Busy people these days are incredibly busier than they were at any time in my memory during my working career, and probably at any time in history.

The danger of daily schedules

I wrote recently about some of the "tells"a maintenance department displays when it is running in a reactive fashion.

One that I left out but should not have overlooked is the issue of daily inspections. When a maintenance department is in a purely reactive mode they tend towards large swathes of daily inspections and regimes.

While I agree that there are definitely some inspections that warrant daily execution, the sort of thing I am talking about here is actually counter-productive and, I believe, extremely dangerous.

I ave come across this more times than I can recall and every tingle time the people in the offices think they are a good thing, while the people roaming the plant on a daily basis think they are utter bunk.

And one brief look at them generally speaks volumes. They are either generic things such as "Check motor" (wonderful) or they are attempts at sophistication like "Check holding bolts for tightness".

Within a few short questions you can usually establish their illegitimacy. For example, "Would these bolts actually come loose in one 24 hour day?", "Is there really the likelihood that this liner will have worn so dramatically within the last day?"and so on.

There are several dangers here, some to the assets themselves and some to the safety of the people doing them.

a) If they just say "check motor" then they are garbage and useful for nothing more than wiping the crib room tables with. Agreed?

b) If they are more prescriptive, and the maintenance is not needed, then a) You are willfully putting people into situations that may be dangerous. Every time intrusive maintenance actually gets done there is an increased risk of human error. And b) You of course increase the likelihood of introducing failure.

c) If they are truly not warranted then the people who have to carry them out will be aware of this. (Let's go with the idea that they are not stupid...) The result? They ignore them and they become ballpoint services. meaning that if there is real inspection mixed in there, or a real reason why they should view, check (whatever) an asset - then it is not going to get done.

So even without issues like wasting time and annoying the life out of the technicians, these sorts of over reactions can lead to troubles, can lead to safety incidents, and can cause a false sense of security.

Yet there are people all over the world who will read this and justify themselves by saying "Yeah, but it sure beats doing nothing"... So does getting it right.

Prioritizing work in progress

Before the turn of the century (makes me sound old doesn't it) I wrote an article on prioritizing works orders in progress.

A decade on it surprises the life out of me that there are still so many companies where the concept of setting work order priorities still seems to create so much confusion.

The process I described in that article was a bit intense, and took a bit to set up and run correctly. But it really did cut the emotion out of the entire process and changed systems from squeaky wheel scheduling to risk based scheduling.

Not only that but once you look at it - it is pretty straight forward and simple. Yet many companies still seem to get confused over what "priority" means when talking about a work order.

Confusion sets in around he curse of criticality, a common affliction for maintenance professionals.

"But it is a critical asset!!" Sure, but that doesn't mean the work on it is "critical/die for it/must happen yesterday" important.

Then you see complications over what to do with PM's, Standing work orders, modifications and additions.. etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Priority (not criticality) of works in progress is there for one reason above all others. To help you (somebody) make decisions about the allocation of scarce resources.

That's it. Period. The more you dig into it, the more you come to this point.

So for my money, priority needs to represent the time window in which the work order should be scheduled. The underlying thought is - if it isn't done by this time, then there could be even more trouble.

Working through it may be different for your company, but generally the outcome revolves around some sort of answer like the following.

Priority                               Meaning
1.                                        Immediate
2.                                        24 hrs 48 hrs (RM's belong here)
3.                                       48hrs < 1w
4.                                        1w - 2w (Modifications start here.)
5.                                        2w - 1m
6.                                        > 1m (Standing work orders if you must)

it also gives you the ability to do cool stuff like reporting on the age versus priority of the work orders in progress to give you an idea of how well, or not, your planners are dealing with the task of backlog management.

Good luck...!!

Cash and maintenance, some online tools

Cashed up is a great term when you are a small to mid sized industrial enterprise. Cashed up means that cash flow is under control AND you have cash in the bank.

Think about what that means to, say, Wessex Water, or one of the several dozen small miners, or small manufacturers. These are cash hungry businesses requiring capital spending, asset replacement and maintenance, raw materials and fuel and energy.

When you take sales out of the picture, then all that remains is the ability to meet demand, and to do so in an economic and safe fashion.

These are the enterprises that need an RCM capability. They need slick and efficient work processes, and they need inventory management processes that doesn't leave them with dead cash. Without these fundamental components the gap between cashed up and in trouble narrows considerably.

(And then we have to cut people, then we don't have enough resources, and then...)

Yet they are precisely the companies that cannot afford bigger-than-Ben-Hur software implementations or "cast of thousands"asset planning teams.

A few things from the net

Paul Barringer (great site by the way) has a great link to an old and outdated version of Raptor RAM modeling tool here. Its good enough to get moving and get some traction, but version 7 is only around $1,000 anyway. (And road tested in the military, aviation and other hazardous industries apparently)  (I use version 7)

OpenFTA for fault tree analysis. Not too sure about this one. I have Windows 7 and it seems to cause problems with some things.

Open source project management, Gantt charting tool.

This is just an absolutely awesome link from the Department of Energy in the USA. The potential for energy efficiency just out of this technological contribution alone is mind blowing.

This is IRCMS, version 6. This is a great tool. Another example of the US government subsidizing reliability efforts. And another potential large booster for small industrial enterprises. I have used it on several deep engineering style projects and would do so again in a heart beat. (You have to create an account somehow.
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Not to be mistaken. Every one of these tools, particularly Raptor and IRCMS, are exceptional tools and not a compromise at all.

At the end of the day you can spend weeks deliberating and running through functionalities... or you can get something done.

A shot in the arm, performance "jump start" techniques

There are numerous things I have seen as examples of leading practice in jump starting flagging performance. Some have been really very inventive, while others have been re-application of basic tenets.

In my experience turnaround initiatives need to have three fundamental qualities;

1. they must be easy to implement, with pilots and small projects up and running within days or weeks, not months, 
2. they need to be designed to deliver impacts early and often, and
3. they need to be sustainable. (Defect elimination (for example) when poorly implemented, tends to produce endless lists of design changes.)

Within asset maintenance there are numerous jump start techniques. Most of which came to the surface during the recent financial crisis. They include areas such as CM for operational parameters - not just asset failure, alignment surveys, cleanliness (remarkably), as well as basic issues like torquing charts, time and motion studies and a raft of others. 

Within the usual suspects for jump start initiatives are three stand out candidates. 

• Defect elimination (well implemented) - Focuses on lost production recording and accountability. Drives existing staff to reason through commonly occurring issues and rapidly implement solutions. 

• Capacity Scheduling - Uncovers a raft of issues in running efficient operations. Everything from exposing waiting times through to issues with front line supervision. (And it's always "too hard" at first)

• Equipment Level benchmarking - Often overlooked. A quick shot in the arm for rapid discovery, validation, and transferral of leading practices. 

Everyone of these delivers rapid results, a positive morale boost, and more importantly - Momentum! 

The key here is to gt them in quick, produce the impacts even quicker, and then move on... Build on success and move towards sustainable low cost enterprises. 

The problem with turnaround activities is that they generate so much initial results that they end up becoming the centerpiece instead of what they are intended to be. Just a standard part of operational discipline. 

Good luck.

Maintenance and Management - The Budget Game (Pt 1)

The Budget Game is played out year after year in the vast majority of asset intensive organizations all around the world. 

And what is the budget game? I'm sure you will recognize it.

1) I know that the manager is going to try to cut back my budget so I am going to pad it out a little.

2) The manager knows that you are trying to pad it out a little, so he knows he has to cut it back.

3) And when we are getting near to the end of the financial year make sure to spend every cent you have or they will take it away from you next year.

Survival of the fittest. Those who can outmaneuver each other wins this round and gets what they want. But generally, the entire organization pays the price. 

The seriousness of this didn't occur to me until I saw the case of Severn Trent Water in the UK. Where the Serious Fraud Office was called in by the industry regulator, with implications of charges being laid against individuals. 

Wow...the entire industry took a deep breath and suddenly every conversation had a different shade to it. 

This was obviously a very specific case and an extreme example. But the more I thought of it the more logical it became. When you pad out a budget what you are actually doing is defrauding the shareholders, owners, and in the case of regulated industries sometimes even the general public.

Yet everyone plays the budget game every year... that's a frightening thought when you look at it in the light of this line of thinking. 

It was about this time that I, and a few select clients at the time, began to look seriously at bidgeting practices and how they could be improved to eliminate The Budget Game.

The screamingly obvious issue was that without a solid and logical tie between performance and risk, and the activities required to achieve it, that this issue was never going to go away.

And in the mire we uncovered a few practices, techniques and planning mechanisms that would not only eliminate the budget game, but when implemented correctly it could force an entirely new dynamic on the management of the asset base. 

The first of these was Zero Based Budgeting, the second, an evolution of the first, was Risk Distributed Budgeting. 

While Zero based Budgeting was not new,  what had been missed previously was it's capability to feed into the long term planning accuracy by setting the framework in place for proactive data capture. (E.g. failure data without crashing a few more assets)

Over the next couple of weeks I am going to post a series on both of these methods, trying to go into detail about what they are, why they matter, how to do it, and of course - how to implement it. (You might want to subscribe via the links at the top, or via the email subscription box on the side.)

Without even considering the financial and risk impacts of this form of work during the implementation, other impacts of this work includes:

• Tying costs directly to the required / expected performance and risk of the physical asset base
• Eliminating costs tied to bad habits formed over years. (Remember the monkeys?)
• Setting up a framework for proactive data capture
• Increasing the accuracy of capital maintenance activities
• Elimination of The Budget Game

And if your organization track such things, and if they do not then they should do, you start to get a vastly higher level of confidence about the net present costs of the asset base. Meaning, more importantly, a far greater level of confidence over the Net present Value or profits of an organization.

That's the sort of thing clients can take to the bond market for billions, not millions, of dollars in potential benefits.

Game changing ideas...


Part 2 - The Root of the problem

The economic crisis and maintaining mining equipment

Times have been tough lately for those of us in the maintenance game.

I work predominantly for Mining, Steel, Oil and Gas and Infrastructure firms. I have done some stuff for Beer producers, food producers and others in the manufacturing sectors, but predominantly I am in the sectors above.

Take the Nickel industry as a case in point. I like Nickel as a commodity. I believe in the long term story around Stainless Steel and its market prospects. But the last year has seen it drop dramatically, while the stockpiles listed on the LEX have grown inordinately.

Demand down, driving prices down, driving stockpiles higher. Even if things pick up tomorrow there will still be a lag on profitability for my client organizations.

In Australia we have seen BHP close Rocky's Reward, sell off the Yabulu smelter (Possibly for different reasons) and recently announce lay offs at Mt Keith. There is a long road ahead for Nickel...

On the other side of the coin are the Gold Producers. Newmont, Barrick, Newcrest and Lihir Gold. These guys were doing okay under the boom conditions of the past few years. But as always, when everything else turns south Gold shoots through the roof.

As always there are purchases, acquisitions, new ventures and projects everywhere.

Somewhere in the middle is Iron Ore and Coal. Sure these guys have been hit with reductions in market prices recently, but they were enormously profitable industries in any case. Pricing is another issue that is different with these industries, but we will leave that to one side for now.

But just as Nickel has a long way to go, these other industries (Gold, Iron Ore and Coal) will soon find themselves under increasing pricing pressure regardless of what happens with the settlement price?

Why? projects coming online. I grew up in Iron Ore provinces, it is literally everywhere. And there are a raft of "juniors" who are entering the market, challenging pricing levels and threatening to create a panoply of providers instead of the few that are in the game now. Coal is similar, and Gold mines always spring up when the money is good.

The lesson here is to avoid the boom and bust of the past. Not on the pricing side, that is a little hard for any one company to control, but on the costs side.

When times are good resources companies tend to bloat up, filling themselves with additional staff, departments and functions within the company. When times are bad it all ends in tears with many promising careers cut short and general disarray facing the organization.

The lesson in all this is simple. Establish the minimum safe cost for maintaining mining assets from the word go, and then stick to it.

And the way to do it is to continually think as an entrepreneur thinks. Focus on what your business is, how you earn money. And push everything else out to the side. Out to where it becomes somebody else's problem, and where it can easily grow or shrink to match corporate requirements.

13 steps to high efficiency in 3 months

Like you I have watched as mining companies, auto manufacturers, plastics manufacturers and others have announced labor cut backs.

Even OPEC is screaming for international help stabilize the oil price.

This is not just commentary. A company my father works for is one of those that has been hit by this crisis so I am feeling this also.

It is a frightening time to be in capital intensive industries. When faced with situations like this, filled with uncertainty the best advice is always to change what you can, and to try not to worry about those things you cannot change.

The near term choice is clear – improve efficiency or die. What I can do, and what I think all leaders in the field should be doing, is helping you by providing you with practical tips and techniques to rapidly increase efficiency.

I hope you can get them implemented and let me know how it goes.

The truth about change is that it actually doesn’t take a long time. Any chance, the decision and commitment to make a change, happens in a split second. You have the motivation now, turn it into immediate action.

Here are thirteen quick tips that you should / could be doing right now!

1) Start identifying bad actors rapidly. Now is not the time to get lost in semantics about criticality, identify where the value is through recording production, recording unplanned outages, identifying their causes and rapidly acting to fix them.

2) Get as many people as possible trained in problem solving techniques. Right away! Immediately!

3) Make sure everyone is aware of the sense of urgency. This is not the time for games like “So I’m trained now what?” Now what is – if you don’t use that knowledge to make things better right now, there may not be a paycheck next month.

4) Implement capacity scheduling. Don’t look for software; use a spreadsheet if you have to. Don’t get wrapped up in the details, just start to schedule your time and work to schedule. The impacts will be huge.

5) Record work delay times right now! You want to be in a position to review these and to start applying problem solving techniques to these within 2 – 10 days.

6) Rehearse the big jobs. Yes that’s right – rehearse it. Just like a parachutist rehearses his jumps, just like a theater rehearses their activities, get the time to dry run through all the activities that are going to happen in the next turnaround; and analyze where inefficiency can be cut from.

7) Start analyzing your really bad actors using RCM (or RCA) right now; today! RCM should not take more than 4 – 5 days to get from Operating context through to packaged and grouped strategies. If it is taking longer than this your facilitators are not experienced enough for what you need today – replace them.

8) Get a hold of all the Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) and run it through Analytical Hierarchical process. This is the foremost decision making method for large quantity and high complexity decisions – do not waste time – do it now. This is how billions and billions of Pounds Sterling are focused throughout the UK rail and water industries. (To name a few)

9) Where possible, at least until you can analyze properly with RCM at a later date, start to replace time based maintenance with predictive maintenance. Train your people, buy the equipment and get moving. Reduced downtime for any reason will give you up to 10x the value that any reductions in costs will.

10) Should you do RCM? Undoubtedly! Should you do it now? Maybe not. Get a very good, very experienced, and very knowledgeable analyst to start looking over the 20% of assets that cost the 80% of maintenance costs. And get them to do a first pass run through at optimizing these strategies.

11) Rapid fire inventory analysis is not a complex or difficult task these days. And it is something that can be done, as a first pass approach, on a spreadsheet using available data.

12) Look, really look, at any options you have for vendor held stock. Any costs you can cut by pushing risk onto vendors helps a lot.

13) Visit the DOE site, download and work out how to use PSAT and their other energy efficiency systems that are free. Get trained if you have to, and start applying this. Energy efficiency is a great area of direct cost reduction because it is normally larger than you think, and it is able to come straight off OPEX somewhere.

These are just ten quick tips to get started. The primary driver for you, however, should be the following: You have 3 months to value! 3 months! Start now and squeeze as much out of the operations as possible, as quick as possible.

Remember, always remember, the goal here is rapid increases of efficiency. You will need to go back and do RCM, you will need to go back and look over the inventory levels, and you will need to go back and look at some of the deeper issues like CAPEX spending optimization.

Good luck!

Internal Reliability Departments and the Allocation of Corporate Capital

I have worked with internal reliability teams in companies ranging from the oil majors, through to mining majors, and including large scale infrastructure companies and institutions in water, rail and electricity.

Without exception all of these departments delivered what could only be described as mediocre results. Harsh words, but somebody needed to say them.

It needs to be added that this had nothing to do with the people who work there. These people are often brilliant, sometimes exceedingly so.

They are also exceptionally driven, exceptionally motivated and people who (like all of us) tend to sincerely enjoy what they do.

So what's the problem? If everyone is so smart and so driven they should be successful shouldn't they? - Not at all. Many brilliant and motivated bankers just allowed the worlds economic system to fall in a heap.

I think there are a lot of reasons for this. The focus on critical assets instead of return on assets, mindless copying of their peers, and a range of other reasons.

However the issues that stands out to me above all else is the lack of a customer service focus.

When you work in a large organization it is hard not to think as others do. You all get similar pay packets, work under similar conditions, and are all driven within the same organizational culture.

I think that departments such as this are going to be coming under increasing levels of scrutiny as the recession worsens in the near future.

The most important executive responsibility of any organization, protected under law in many western economies, is the creation of shareholder value. This means the allocation of capital.

They have three options for capital allocation (Warren Buffets views not mine)

1. Buy growth through expansion or acquisition

2. Generate growth through internal improvement initiatives

3. Return the capital to their shareholders via buy-backs and dividends etcetera.

Departments like these, in fact all of us really, live in area number two.

And if we are not a good choice for the allocation of capital then the organization is obliged to look elsewhere.  Think this is far fetched?

I used to work for BHP Engineering back in the day when I worked in Latin America. Towards the end of my tenure there BHPE was bundled up, with its software and technologies, and sold off to Hatch and a few other smaller players.

Why? Do you think it was because they could get a good price? They didn't, big asset centric organizations don't make brilliant sales people of assets.

They sold them because it was no longer a valid and value adding allocation of their capital. Period.

And BHPE held a proud place in the BHP pantheon back then. If it happened to them, it can happen to others. And if the value is not there, then the executive directors of these organizations actually have very little choice but to look elsewhere for these services.

Maintenance maturity and common errors

By now there is probably not a maintenance or reliability practitioner in the world who doesn't know about the maintenance maturity approach.

Starting out in the late 1980's this approach was publicized widely by Terry Wireman in one of his early books, and it has been plagiarized mercilessly ever since unfortunately.

You know the one right - you start at reactive, work through planned to precision and then reliability or world class. (Or some variation of these)

The problem, and there are a few, is that most consultants and even practitioners tend to start offering services around the reliability or precision part of the scale. Yet there are often gigantic benefits to be had by focusing on the basic elements of maintenance.

Things like eliminating or reducing vibration, implementing good and useful condition monitoring, clean equipment, operators trained in basic maintenance and adjustments and so on.

Then there's the planning side of things. Capacity scheduling, delay elimination or minimization, recording and capturing data in an effective and useful manner.

The whole maintenance maturity thing is great - that's why it has been ripped off so many times - but lets not forget that the early steps are often the most beneficial and contain the most value. Particularly if things have been allowed to drift for a while.

Don't cut costs, cut waste

we often focus, incorrectly, on costs when our main drive should be on waste. I have posted here and elsewhere on the differences between costs and cost effectiveness,and it is a view that has served me and my clients well over the past twenty years.

At a high level productivity without waste is seen principally in the cost effectiveness of the organization. Costs per product of maintenance, when applied correctly, gives us a drive to maximize and sustain output levels - not just to take a razor to the direct costs of running things.

One of the most powerful processes to do this is through a meticulous focus on what is called "tool time". Tool time is the amount of time that your people actually spend doing the work. Not preparing for the work, not getting parts for it or doing the paperwork - but in actually doing the work.

The first step is to ensure that you can record this in some fashion. Time and motion studies during turnarounds, large overhauls and routine replacement tasks can reveal an incredible level of waste that is able to be cut. In one particular case I recall a locomotives company in Mexico was able to reduce their turnaround time from 4 days to less than two.

How? Relocation of tools, delivering parts "to the elbow", reducing the walking and roaming time of workers and through being innovative in the way that they arranged the work schedule. Particularly with respect to fully utilizing resources prior to their role on the job - and once their role had been carried out.

So T&M studies still have their benefits, even at the start of the 21st century. But by far the best way of measuring tool time and tracking the impact of initiatives is through recording delays to work.

Delay coding exists on most CMMS programs, particularly (from memory) the Mincom, MRO and SAP modules.

The basic idea is that each person records the delays they encountered dutring each task. Codes are organized to match the real world with things like waiting for parts, waiting for permits and waiting for equipment being commonly used.

Not a solution in itself, but the start of a solution. Work delay reports then become part of the maintenance planners regularly reviewed reports, and they are able to initiate action to start to uncover root causes and put fixes in place.

Delay coding, when coupled with capacity scheduling, provide a very powerful one-two punch for you to start the job of driving inefficiency out of your organization.

What has been your experiences with doing this?

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Easy Money

Don't panic! When the crunch comes it is very easy to go for the big stuff. Cut numbers, cut inventory, make do with what we have, cut CAPEX... But what we are actually doing is cutting our throats.

Cutting in an uncontrolled fashion may save today, but it dooms tomorrow.

There are numerous easy to implement techniques and tactics that can cut a lot out of the budget, without risking the reliability of the asset base. In fact, to the contrary, they improve the overall reliability of our physical assets.

A really quick one is Capacity Scheduling. And its a really quick one because it doesn't need software particularly, nor does it need any very difficult training.

The principle is simple. You have a finite amount of time to use on maintaining the plant. So use it to your best advantage.

How much time can you schedule?

How much do you have in total? At first this is best done for a single discipline team. If you have team members who work in several disciplines then you can work it together.

Take away the time for lunches, breaks, wash up time allotments, toolbox meetings and so on.

Take a percentage away to correspond with your leave policies.

Then take 5 - 10 percent for breakdowns, and 5 - 10 percent for work with other teams. This part is crucial and so often overlooked.

If you don't factor in a percentage for breakdowns then, right now, your plan is probably not going to be achievable. If you don't factor in time working with other teams, ditto.

Then you are looking at the actual time you have left to schedule for work. Not much is it? And this isn't the tool time either, working out delays and maximizing efficiency is a whole other area.

What can you schedule?

With the available time now showing, we can start to slot in the work orders that need to be done.

First, the routine work. Always the routine work first! Why? Because if we miss it then you are missing a detective, predictive or preventive task - meaning that your plant is now in danger of an undetected or unplanned failure.

Sort of makes the point for getting your maintenance regimes in order doesn't it? Anyway...
With the routine work scheduled, then we can start to slot in the corrective work. Don't over do it, don't go past the limits. Schedule right up to what you have available and don't go past it.

So why start here?

With a little bit of smarts this can be done in a spreadsheet. I have built several at different times to do this. You don't need a CMMS or anything else. (Although if you have one all the better)

The reason why capacity scheduling is such as powerful improvement initiative is because it shines the light on other important areas of maintenance planning and scheduling. To do this right you need:
Planned routine work orders. Complete with hours, resources, times and parts.

Planned corrective work orders. Everything that isn't urgent is corrective.

This means that you also need some form of work order prioritization approach. (Later...)

This is also a very good time to introduce delay coding and accurate time reporting, but we will deal with that in a separate post.

And that is about it. The very first time you do this you will find that you either have very little work that is truly planned, or you have too many people. One or the other. It rarely works out perfectly once you get smart about it.

Work through week 1, I really suggest that you do this in weekly intervals at first. Check your schedule compliance.

Did you get everything done that you wanted to get done? Easily? Have you recorded the times for each task? How did they go? Are they accurate? No - then change them.

Capacity scheduling is an iterative methodology. You get better as you get more informed, and it has an impact through many of the fundamental areas of planning and scheduling.

Remember - efficiency = productive without waste. It doesn't mean running on the bones, that is a sure-fire way to decrease reliability.

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Unlocking the Hidden Workforce

After decades of cutting costs through traditional methods, further efficiency gains are either limited or physically impossible. 

This article looks at sophisticated new metrics and methods to unlock the hidden maintenance workforce in your plant.

The Maintenance Productivity Factor (MPF) was created by Daryl Mather in 2002 and is used widely in productivity audits, shutdown efficiency reviews and developing ongoing plans to improve efficiency. For information on Reliability Success services in this area please send an email.

Increasing challenges for maintainers

After decades of evolving in virtual isolation, physical asset management now attracts interest from corporate management, institutions, regulators and government bodies. 

Asset managers feel the impact of this attention in two areas:

• First, in the increasingly sophisticated expectations. High confidence, defensible budgetary submissions to regulators, accurate whole-of-life cost forecasts for shareholders, and confidently managing asset risk to tolerable levels.

• Second, in the increased level of pressure to increase the return on capital through traditional areas of efficiency and cost savings. (Labor and materials)

On one hand this has invigorated the interest in techniques and issues related to reliability, which is a welcome change to what maintainers have been used to in the recent past. 

On the other hand it has also created a significant issue for asset managers.