If you, as leader in your company, feel your true risk/reward ratio for deferred maintenance is excessive and want to defeat your backlogged maintenance, there are some very good tools to accomplish this.
I refer to this as vertically integrated maintenance (VM). VM puts as many different trades as possible into one asset group at one time for a two-day period surge effort to write off as many open work orders (WOs) as possible. There are several distinct advantages:
- Planning — In my VM program, we try to schedule two major assets a week until all the assets have had the benefit of the surge effort, and then start over again. This is not a vaccination; it is a maintenance therapy scheduled indefinitely into the future. One month before the VM event, we inspect the asset with the VM maintenance leader, a repair maintenance leader, an operator, a user representative and supporting vendors. This inspection team has a list of all outstanding WOs and examines each, adding new and unreported maintenance needs. It is not unusual for the team to double the WOs for the asset. This is not a bad thing because each new thing is small and can be repaired before it fails. So, 15 newly discovered things that have not failed can be fixed in the time it takes to fix one thing that has failed. This is how you win at maintenance.
- Parts — Awaiting parts is the biggest problem in maintenance; however, since vendors are encouraged to participate in the inspection, their eyes are actually on the problems’ assets and the opportunity to get the correct parts to the job is greatly improved.
- Worker efficiency — Planning a month ahead, the VM team can schedule the trades needed to complete the WOs by segregation of tasks. Each worker will have multiple WOs assigned during the surge and will stay on-site until his tasks are complete. If awaiting parts, the VM leader gets the parts and the worker picks another WO and returns to work. As parts arrive, the WO is completed. This dramatically reduces “windshield time” and allows the worker to stay engaged.
- Worker support — In large operations, the worker often works unsupported. In a VM event, there are workers from other trades around them. This has proven to be invaluable at the interface between electrical and mechanical machines where the problem cascades from one need to another. Having workers at the same asset for a couple of days stops the bounce between shops.
- User confidence — The user of the asset is kept in the loop by a mobile maintenance control board at the site and can track the needs of the asset. They find comfort the VM team will first make the asset safe, then reliable and then pretty. When the user sees the number of WOs being completed, he will have confidence in the quality of the maintenance he is getting.
- Operator involvement in maintenance — During this VM program, the operator will become more competent in the mechanical management of the asset and operationally induced events (OIEs) will diminish. OIEs are events that are not caused by maintenance. Tracking OIEs offers a great opportunity to target one-on-one training events with the user to make breakdown problems go away. When operators see damage assets can be identified by a dollar value next to their names, their behavior changes very quickly and reliability increases.
Many WOs can be worked off in a surprisingly short time. Support for VM is needed from the highest levels of management. Once the leadership declares a VM program will be a permanent part of the plan to reduce deferred maintenance, the recaptured 60-to-1 ratio in dollars and the 15-to-1 ratio in maintenance man-hours once spent on breakdown events can be plowed back into the process to create a self-financing solution to improved maintenance reliability.
For more information, contact David Geaslin by email at david@geaslin.com or call (832) 524-8214.
