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The best practices project

Here’s an opportunity to benchmark using real-world data

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By David Berger, P. Eng., Contributing Editor

PlantServices.com

Response to my column titled “Use sound reasoning to determine maintenance best practices” (Plant Services, October 2005) was substantial. Clearly, this is a topic near and dear to many readers. That’s why we’d like to revisit the topic, but this time, formally invite you to participate in the project. This month, I’ll provide a list of questions from various areas within maintenance management to elicit your thoughts on best practices.

These questions were extracted from a maintenance audit checklist I use for identifying improvement opportunities. As you read them, think of what you consider to be best practices regarding each topic. Send me your ideas (david@wmc.on.ca) and we’ll turn them into a future column. But, before you do anything else, be sure to read the sidebar, “Send a best practice (or two)."

Attitude
Tell us your best practices for motivating workers and management, which lead to a more positive working environment, higher employee satisfaction and, ultimately, greater productivity. Describe your best practices that better align the operations, engineering and maintenance departments.

How do you build a high level of trust between the many silos of your organization? What do operations workers and their management say about the ability and attitude of maintenance workers and their managers? What is top management’s attitude towards maintenance? Are there signs that attitude is deteriorating such as:
  • Poor workmanship

  • Poor housekeeping

  • Refusal to work overtime

  • Increasing tardiness, absenteeism and turnover

  • Increasing number of grievances

  • Constant bickering and verbal abuse

  • Decreasing amount of worker/supervisor interaction

  • Increasing downtime

  • Decreasing utilization and pace of work

  • Less initiative and creativity shown by workers
Strategy
Send us your ideas about best practices concerning strategy issues such as how to do strategic planning, what performance targets you’ve achieved, what incentives you use to ensure your plan is met or exceeded, etc.
  • How do you determine which projects to embrace for best results (eg, Total Productive Maintenance, Lean, Six Sigma, Reliability-Centered Maintenance)?

  • What is the budgeted versus actual cost of internal and contract labor, spare parts and overtime for the past month?

  • What are the maintenance department’s goals and objectives according to maintenance management? Maintenance workers? Operations? Top management?

  • What targets have been established for meeting stated goals and objectives (eg. expected level of downtime, labor utilization, overtime, response time, mean time between failures, inventory level and turns)?

  • Are there targets for the short- and long-term?

  • What measures and incentives are in place to ensure that targets are met?

  • Are there recognized drivers for the measures such as customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, risk management and operational excellence?

  • Are expectations well understood (for example, operations expects a five-minute response time for any major downtime incident)?

  • Have the measures been baselined (current downtime level is below four percent?

  • Have the measures been benchmarked to determine reasonableness of those expectations?

  • Have action items and projects been identified to ensure targets are met?

  • Is it clear what the expected contribution is to be for each project in meeting performance targets?

  • Are there formal project plans for each project?
Organizational structure
E-mail your thoughts on best practices regarding organizational issues such as multi-skilling, shift coverage, specialized crews and the role of supervision.
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