| The reason I do these things is that I want to improve in some way. As goes our personal lives, so goes our work. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure”, said Peter Drucker. |
| Whatever you call it – metrics, measurements, or key performance indicators (KPI) – maintenance and engineering managers must have performance measurements in place either to validate that the work their staffs are performing in achieving the departments’ goals and objectives or to identify opportunities for continuous improvement. |
| Among the most commonly used measurements that managers can put into practice to determine performance are: |
| • |
Mean Time To Repair: MTTR is the measure of the department’s ability to perform maintenance to retain or restore assets to a specified condition. |
| • |
Mean Time Between Failure: MTBF is a basic measure of an asset’s reliability. It is calculated by dividing the total operating time of the asset by the number of failures over a given period of time. |
| • |
Availability: This measurement expresses the probability that an asset can perform its intended function satisfactorily when needed in a stated environment. |
| These measurements enable managers to track equipment, personnel and reliability performance. At the end of the day, each of these measurements has a financial impact on the organization. |
| Managers who opt not to measure, track and respond to the results are putting their organizations at risk. It has been reported that reactive maintenance can be three-four times more expensive than proactive maintenance and that 30-33 percent of a department’s average maintenance budget is wasted on poor maintenance practices. |
| If equipment availability is lower than 95 percent, that could be a valid reason for a manager to conduct a formal root-cause analysis or a failure-modes-and-effects analysis. |
| When attempting to implement a reliability culture within a maintenance and engineering department, it actually will take managers some time to acclimate department staff and front-line technicians to a new way of performing and of thinking. It is considered common that when embarking on the reliability path, maintenance costs actually increase initially. |
| In Ron Moore’s book Making Common Sense Common Practice, he sights two studies. |
| The first study, Ormandy’s “Achieving the Optimum Maintenance and Asset Strategy and Ensuring They Are Aligned with Business Goals,” found that maintenance costs increased by 15 percent in departments making the transion to a reliability culture, but over time were reduced by 20 percent. |
| The second study, by C.D. Kelly, entitled “Leadership for Change: Developing a Reliability Improvement Strategy,” found the following results. |
| • |
Repair expenses increased by 30 percent during the first 12-18 months, then declined to 50-80 percent below the original levels after 24 months. |
| • |
Breakdowns declined by 50-60 percent. |
| • |
Downtime declined by 60-80 percent. |
| • |
The spare parts inventory decreased by 20-30 percent. |
| By measuring failure rates and probability of failure, the potential could be major dividends that help managers refocus their efforts to eliminate failure, unscheduled downtime and risk. |
|
|
