Effective Maintenance Metrics Made Simple

 Effective Maintenance Metrics Made Simple

 

If you need a comprehensive approach to managing Maintenance in your organization please read further.  (excerpts from chapter 6.3, "Rules of Thumb for Maintenance and Reliability Engineers" by Keith Mobley and Ricky Smith)

Let's be honest, many organizations are managing maintenance with a couple of metrics which do not tell the "whole story". Hopefully this article will give you ideas to optimize your maintenance metrics.  "Managing with the wrong metrics is like driving a car with the windshield painted black"

“It is not possible to manage what you cannot control and you cannot control what you cannot measure!” (Peter Drucker) 

Performance measurement is a fundamental principle of management. The measurement of performance is important because it identifies current performance gaps between current and desired performance and provides indication of progress towards closing the gaps. Carefully selected key performance indicators identify precisely where to take action to improve performance. 

This paper deals with the identification of key performance indicators for the maintenance function. Since performance measurements for maintenance must include both leading metrics and metrics for the process that produces the results, this document presents a representation for the business process for maintenance. 

Key performance indicators for the maintenance function need to include both leading (maintenance process) measures and lagging (result) measures. This paper focuses on identifying both leading and lagging measures of maintenance performance. Collectively, these measurements are the key performance indicators for the maintenance function.

Reliability Process Key Performance Indicators – Leading Measures

The maintenance process is made up of elements. All elements are required to complete the supply chain. Key performance indicators of the maintenance process are process assurance measures. They answer the question ‘how do I know that this maintenance process element is being performed well?’ The day-to-day execution of maintenance is addressed through the seven elements of the Reliability Process; Business Focus, Work Identification, Work Planning, Work Scheduling, Work Execution, Follow-up and Performance Analysis. 

"Key performance indicators for each element are recommended."

It should be noted that variations of these metrics may be defined or additional performance metrics may be used. The metrics presented here provide a clear indication if the requirements of each element are being satisfied and, if not, what action should be taken to correct the lack of maintenance process adherence.

Work Identification 

The function of work identification is to identify the "right work at the right time".

1.Work Requests or Notification

Initiating a work request is one method of identifying work. Once a work request is submitted it must be reviewed, validated and approved before it becomes an actual work order ready to be planned. If the work request process is performing well, the validation and approval/rejection of work requests should occur promptly. 

A highly recommended measure for the work request process is: 

The percentage of work requests remaining in “Request” status for less than 5 days, over a specified time period (for example the last 30 days). The world class maintenance expectation is that most work (>80%) requests would be reviewed and validated within a maximum of 5 days.  Work requests rely on the random identification of problems or potential problems and bringing them to the attention of maintenance to address them. In a world class organization, work identification is not left to chance.

Proactive Work

The ‘Proactive Maintenance Program’ is designed to identify potential failure conditions, changes in state of hidden functions and known age related failure causes. The development of the Proactive Maintenance Program defines the routine maintenance tasks that must be executed to achieve the performance levels required to meet business requirements. If the ‘Maintenance Program’ is effective, it will successfully identify and address most maintenance preventable causes of failure.

2. Work Identification

If the ‘Work Identification’ function is working well, the majority of work performed by maintenance would consist of executing the Maintenance Program tasks and the corrective work originating from it. 

The key performance indicator for the Work Identification element is:

The percentage of available man-hours used for proactive work over a specified time period. The world class maintenance target for proactive work is 75 to 80%. Recognizing that 5 -10% of available man-hours should be attributed to improvement work (non-maintenance) this would leave approximately 10% - 15% reactive work.

3. Work Planning

The primary function of the Work Planning element of the maintenance process is to prepare the work to achieve maximum efficiency in execution.

Amount of Planned Work

In general terms, planning defines how to do the job and identifies all the required resources and any special requirements to execute the work. A properly planned work order would include all this information. Maximizing maintenance efficiency requires a high percentage of planned work.

A measure of whether planning is taking place is:

The percentage of all work orders, over a specified time period, with all the planning fields completed (ex. Labor assignments, task duration, work priority, required by date, etc). The world class expectation is that >95% of all jobs should be planned.

4. Responsiveness of Planning

Another key performance indicator for planning is the time it takes a work order to be planned. A suggested measure of this is:  The percentage of work orders in ‘planning status’ for less than 5 days, over a specified time period. A world class performance level of at least 80% of all work orders processed in 5 days or less should be possible. Some work orders will require more time to plan but attention must be paid to 'late finish or required by date'.

5. Quality of Planning

These key performance indicators for planning do not reflect the quality of the planning being done. A critical aspect of planning is estimating resources. The quality of planning can be measured by monitoring the accuracy of estimating. Labor and material resources are the dominant resources specified on a work order. 

 

The accuracy of estimating labor can be measured by:

The percentage of work orders with man-hour estimates within 10% of actual over the specified time period. Estimating accuracy of greater than 90% would be the expected level of world class maintenance performance.

 

A second metric of planning quality, addressing material estimates, would be: 

The percentage of planned, scheduled and assigned work orders, where execution is delayed due to the need for materials (spare parts) over the specified time period. The world class maintenance expectation is that less than 2% of all work assigned will have a material deficiency (due to planning).Note: this assumes the job should not have been scheduled if the materials were not available. Therefore, the problem is that the work order did not account for all the required materials. 

6. Work Scheduling

Good planning is a prerequisite to scheduling. The primary function of scheduling is to coordinate the availability of the asset(s) to be maintained with all the required resources; labor, material and services creating a schedule to execute ‘the right work at the right time’. The schedule is a contract between operations and maintenance. The ‘right work at the right time’ implies that this work must be executed within the specified time period to achieve the desired level of performance. Failure to execute within the schedule period will increase the risk of failure. 

With good work identification, planning and scheduling in place, the weekly maintenance schedule should be produced several days in advance of the beginning of the schedule period. There should be confidence that this schedule reflects the work that will be completed through the schedule period.

7. Quality of Scheduling

A key performance indicator for the scheduling function is:

The percentage of work orders, over the specified time period, that have a scheduled date earlier or equal to the ‘late finish or required by date’. A world class maintenance target of >95% should be expected in order to ensure the majority of the work orders are completed before their 'late finish or required-by date.'

A second measure of the quality of scheduling is:

The percentage of work orders assigned “Delay” status due to unavailability of manpower, equipment, space or services over the specified time period.

8. Volume of Scheduled Work 

The scheduling of properly planned work is also important to maximize maintenance efficiency. We would anticipate that a high percentage of the available maintenance man-hours would be committed to a schedule. A second scheduling key performance indicator measures:  The percentage of scheduled available man-hours to total available man-hours over the specified time period. A world class target of >80% of man-hours should be applied to scheduled work. 

It is not desirable to schedule 100% of available man-hours within a schedule period, because we recognize that additional work will arise after the schedule has been cast. This includes both emergency work and other schedule write-ins that must be accommodated during the schedule period.

9. Work Execution

Work execution begins with the assignment of work to the people responsible for executing it and ends when the individuals charged with responsibility for execution provide feedback on the completed work.

10. Schedule Compliance

With a high quality of work identification, planning and scheduling, maintenance resources should execute according to the plan and schedule. Therefore, a key performance indicator of execution is schedule compliance. Schedule compliance is defined as:       The percentage of work orders completed during the schedule period before the late finish or required by date. World class maintenance should achieve >90% schedule compliance during execution.

11. Quality of Work Execution

Work execution quality is measured by: The percentage of rework. World class levels of maintenance rework are less than 3%.

12. Work Order Completion

The purpose of identifying maintenance process key performance indicators is to help manage the maintenance process. The ability to successfully monitor and manage the process and measure the results of the process is highly dependent on gathering correct information during work execution. The vehicle for collecting this information is the work order. Work orders should account for ‘all’ work performed on assets. This is necessary to gather accurate maintenance cost and history data, enabling the management of the physical asset through its life cycle.  

A returned work order should indicate the status of the job (complete, incomplete), the actual labor and material consumed, an indication of what was done and/or what was found and recommendations for additional work. In addition, information about process and equipment downtime and an indication of whether the maintenance conducted was in response to a failure should be provided. 

The idea that the job is not done until the work order is completed and returned is a significant challenge to many organizations. For this reason it is also important to have a key performance indicator on work order completion. This metric should look at:

The percentage of work orders turned in with all the data fields completed. World class maintenance organizations achieve 95% compliance.

Follow-up

In the Follow-up element of the maintenance process, actions are initiated to address the information identified during execution. Some key follow-up tasks include reviewing work order comments and closing out completed work orders, initiating corrective work and initiating part and procedural updates as required.

13. Work Order Closure

Timely follow-up and closure of completed work orders is essential to maintenance success. A key performance indicator for follow-up is:  The percentage of work orders closed within a maximum of 3 days, over the specified time period. The expectation is that >95% of all completed work orders should be reviewed and closed within 3 days. 

14. Performance Analysis

The performance analysis element of the maintenance process evaluates maintenance effectiveness by focusing on key performance indicators of maintenance results. Gaps between the actual and required performance of the maintained asset are identified. Significant performance gaps are addressed by initiating work identification improvement actions to close the performance gap. 

Presence of Performance Analysis

One indication that performance analysis is being executed is the existence of the maintenance result metrics.

Quality of Performance Analysis

From a maintenance process perspective it is important that these results are driving action. Therefore, a key performance indicator for performance analysis is a measure of:

• The number of reliability improvement actions initiated through performance analysis during the specified period. No absolute number is correct but no number suggests inaction.     
• A second measure is the number of asset reliability actions resolved over the last month. In other words, a measure of how successful the organization is in performance gap closure.

I would love to hear your successes and challenges. You inspire me by your feedback. Good luck my friends and if you need advice please ask.

 

The Author: Ricky Smith CMRP, CMRT, CRL

 

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