Achieving World Class Maintenance Status
Measuring and assessing maintenance performance
By Paul D. Tomlingson

“World class” performance is the ultimate objective of many maintenance organizations. It marks the organization as a leader in its industry and sets it apart as the ultimate achiever. But, what is world class, and how can it be achieved? World class maintenance could result when an organization consistently produces reliable equipment by conducting an effective program using accurate, timely, complete information. The challenge is to determine what constitutes a world class maintenance organization and then derive a specific set of performance standards that, if honestly met, universally identify the qualifying organization as world class within its industry. Most maintenance organizations admit a need to improve. With world class performance as a target, they should take steps to assess their “as-is” performance status and determine what they must improve to meet the target. Evaluation is the first step of improvement. An evaluation
establishes the current performance level by identifying those activities needing improvement as well as those being performed well. The most important byproducts of an effective evaluation will be the education of personnel about specific improvements and their purpose, and obtaining their genuine commitment to helping achieve the improvements. An effective evaluation must compare the demonstrated performance of the subject organization against a set of standards that are consistent with the type of industrial maintenance organization being assessed. The evaluation procedure should be an established management practice that initially establishes the organization’s “as is” performance level; then, at regular intervals measures progress toward meeting the standards. Successful maintenance is not a stand-alone activity. Maintenance planning, for example, cannot be evaluated in isolation. It must be examined in the light of how well purchasing and warehousing support material needs or how effectively the information system allows the planner to manage planned jobs from inception to completion. If operations were to consistently elect to try to meet elusive production targets ahead of making equipment available for scheduled maintenance, poor maintenance performance (by operations default) would be the unfortunate result. Maintenance would be equally unsuccessful if their maintenance program were undocumented “folklore,” inadequately communicated to other departments that want to help but can only guess how. Maintenance would surely fail if the mine manager thought of maintenance as a necessary evil—a cost reduction challenge to be quickly solved by an ill informed workforce reduction.

Who Evaluates?
We often think of consultants as evaluators. They can be neutral third parties with experience in various types of operations. But, their evaluation may come with a huge price tag and might cause prolonged disruption of mine operations. Mine personnel might be spectators rather than participants in the evaluation process, and the employees’ unique, pertinent and factual knowledge of actual mine circumstances could be overlooked. Therefore, a mine should choose wisely if they want consultants to evaluate them. And, there are evaluation techniques, equally as effective as those provided by consultants, that are less disruptive and costly and produce reliable results. For example: A cross-section of mine personnel, rating maintenance against a series of performance standards that touch on everything from mine manager- ship to production cooperation to staff department support to preventive maintenance, planning, scheduling and the effective use of information. If that cross-section were to consist of managers who watch all departments interact, to staff departments that support maintenance, plus production people who use maintenance services and maintenance themselves, it is possible that a good picture of actual performance could result. Moreover, if each group were represented by a vertical slice of their personnel, the results might be even better. Suppose, for instance, that the maintenance group included the maintenance manager, several supervisors, planners, a maintenance engineer and various craftsmen. Consider what might result if the maintenance manager learned that a new procedure was considered impractical by his supervisors, and the craftsmen for whom it was intended never heard of it. The outcome of the combined ratings would confirm that the maintenance manager should have conferred with his key personnel as future procedures are developed. He would have learned a valuable lesson first hand and be inclined to correct it—particularly if the mine manager has read the same report.

The Value of Benchmarking and KPI’s
Is benchmarking a suitable evaluation technique for achieving maintenance improvement? The idea of learning from other's good ideas or benefiting from their successful experiences as well as avoiding their mistakes is a philosophy of long standing. But make certain that what is benchmarked has value to your improvement needs. Benchmarking is only a comparison of pertinent practices, not a contrast of performance. Therefore, while helpful in the overall aspect of improvement, benchmarking alone will not bring about the improvement necessary to achieve world class performance. Rather, it might help to identify those organizations that have achieved it and encourage the innovative adaptation of their best practices to the aspiring maintenance organization. Furthermore, serious flaws exist in the prevailing notion that key performance indices (KPI’s) are an effective performance measurement tool and that actions based on their results can help a maintenance organization achieve top level performance status. Key performance indices are useful in revealing a trend toward realizing a visualized performance target. However, the field data on which the indices are often based is usually developed and submitted by the same people who are to be evaluated. Unless the monitoring organization can verify the validity of the ingredient data, the resulting indices may be suspect. Agreement on which performance indices best reveal actual circumstances can be difficult and the logic for their inclusion questioned. For example, one popular index is the amount of work that a maintenance organization plans. Inconsistencies abound; preventive maintenance, for instance, is often considered to be planned and scheduled. In reality, PM services were planned when the PM program was initially developed. Thus, PM services are repetitively scheduled not planned on a week to week basis as is other work embraced by this index such as overhauls or major component replacements. For reasons such as this, the intended interpretation of indices must be established with care. While a typical mine manager who looks at an array of performance indices can observe relative scores, he often cannot direct a specific corrective action as a result. By contrast, an evaluation technique built on a cross-section of mine personnel rating a series of appropriate, pertinent performance standards will identify exactly what is in need of improvement and establish the proper corrective actions, by urgency and priority. To illustrate: Too little planning often means that the PM inspection and testing program fails to find deficiencies with sufficient lead-time to be able to plan the work rather than react to it. If specific standards assess planning as inadequate and identify poorly executed PM inspection and testing along with poor PM schedule compliance by operations, the mine manager now has the right improvement target and a specific improvement action. If this knowledge causes him to look in on a typical weekly operations and maintenance scheduling meeting only, to find an indifferent planner talking to empty operations chairs, he can focus on fixing the problem of too little planning, permanently. By contrast, a single KPI simply telling him there is too little planning only frustrates him. Performance indices are often limited to examining only direct maintenance activities such as planning without assessing underlying factors that influence the success of planning—quality of material support provided by warehousing or purchasing, for example. From the mine manager’s view, the contrast between looking at indices and reviewing the details of a well-conceived self-evaluation is the difference between looking out the window to guess how you are doing versus “management by walking around.”

What’s the Frequency?
Overly frequent evaluation of weekly indices soon loses its appeal—similar to the work order procedure that requires reporting of delay causes for each job. Such procedures often get off to an enthusiastic start but are ultimately abandoned. Problems revealed in this week’s index are seldom able to be acted on in the short interval. By contrast, self-evaluation applied at longer intervals (~6 months) is less intrusive and more anticipated. Random sampling, one of the principles underlying a self-evaluation, is more realistic than KPI’s. It is welcomed as an opportunity to see how the organization stacks up against a pertinent series of performance standards. Thereafter, a periodic repeat of the evaluation acts as a report card on improvement progress. This report card is also welcomed because it represents the progress made by the same personnel who identified necessary improvements needs at the start of the self-evaluation process. Most importantly, self-evaluation allows dedicated, skilled craftsmen and others to participate in the assessment process. They seize the opportunity to offer frank and objective assessments knowing that otherwise they might never have been asked. When combined with the responses of the balance of the cross-section of the mine population, the result is a more reliable assessment with specific insights into the right corrective actions. If an evaluation were to cover hundreds of performance standards, all rated by a crosssection of knowledgeable, caring mine personnel, the results could help propel maintenance toward positive corrective actions leading to the real attainment of world-class status. Repetitions of the evaluation at thoughtful intervals would act to measure interim improvement progress toward that goal. A self-evaluation—assuming it contains the right standards—has considerable, direct improvement potential. Personnel know the mine well. They are familiar with people in other departments and how they must interact successfully. As they rate the standards, they are likely to be frank and objective in identifying and prioritizing actions or procedures that should be changed or improved. They know that they are going to be directly affected by the potentially beneficial outcome they visualize. They concurrently make a genuine commitment to help implement changes they see as practical and necessary. Unlike spectators to third party evaluations by consultants or employees who observe the irate mine manager’s demand for more planning, self-evaluation participants can impact their own futures directly and they know it.

Defining Evaluation Standards
An inevitable question is: What standards should apply, and who says they are the right ones? Developing the right standards is a task that must precede any evaluation effort that compares current performance against them. The standards must be based on a well-conceived, fully documented, well-understood and effectively executed maintenance program. A well–defined and effective maintenance program spells out the interaction of all departments as they request or identify work, classify it to determine the best reaction, plan selected work to ensure it is accomplished efficiently, schedule the work to ensure it is performed at the best time with the most effective use of resources. In addition, the maintenance program specifies how work is assigned to personnel in a way that assures each person has a full shift of bona–fide work. Then, as work is performed, the program establishes work control procedures to ensure quality work, completed on time. In addition, the program specifies how completed work is measured to ensure timely completion, under budget with quality results. The maintenance program should also prescribe a means of periodic evaluations to identify and prioritize improvement needs. The maintenance program is the soul of the overall maintenance effort. It defines the basics of what maintenance does, who does what, how they do it and why. When the program is well-conceived, fully-documented and well-understood across the operation it will be effectively executed and produce quality results. By sharp contrast, a maintenance department uncertain of these basics cannot determine how they will organize or even select the right information systemmuch less use it effectively. The end result is a totally reactionary maintenance effort. A quality maintenance program is fundamental to the development of performance standards and to the ultimate success of maintenance. Few maintenance organizations have such programs, fewer yet have documented them and very few have bothered to explain how they do their work to even their own people. Customers in operations and supporting departments guess at what is expected of them, fail to be of proper assistance to maintenance and, in exasperation, usually ask, “what program?” Mine managers often express the same frustration. For maintenance departments without such programs, life is difficult. Developing standards is out of the question and attempts to adopt advanced strategies like reliability centered maintenance (RCM) or total productive maintenance (TPM) fail most of the time. Similarly, implementation of modern techniques for improving equipment reliability may fail as well. More, importantly, the fundamentals of maintenance management are never mastered. A totally reactionary maintenance organization can never hope to achieve top level performance. But, the organization that has a well-defined program can establish the standards it must meet and, with the aid of an established self-evaluation procedure, move toward and achieve world class status.

Paul D. Tomlingson is principal of management consulting firm Paul D. Tomlingson Associates (www.tomlingson. com). He can be contacted by e-mail at pdtmtc@sprynet.com