Measure What Business Benefits Maintenance is Achieving
Maintenance makes serious money for a company by delivering operating equipment reliability and operating equipment risk reduction. You see the effects of both good and bad maintenance in the cost of your products. Bad maintenance policies and practices add operating cost whereas excellent maintenance policies and practices lower costs.
A useful site level maintenance KPI to measure is the proportion of operating costs attributable to Maintenance per unit of production. The Maintenance Group then has bottom level KPIs identifying where the cost contributions come from that make-up the maintenance proportion of the unit cost of production. This KPI directly links Maintenance to operating profit. You would be aiming to get a steady downward trend in maintenance cost per unit of production as evidence of continual improvement. The unit cost of production values may need to be identified by using Activity Based Costing, since financial accounting is often not detailed enough to differentiate the individual cost components of your products.
Use Visual Management Principles to Display KPIs for Action
Where possible show KPIs visually rather than in lists or tables. This encourages people to meet their obligations by employing psychology to drive good behaviours—we all want to be seen as competent and professional in what we do. An example is the stacked bar chart in Figure 6 where the group‘s performance in meeting their targets is clear to everyone . This visual management device shows current progress in meeting a necessary target. If targets are not met people see that there is a problem and start to query and resolve the cause(s).
The example bar charts are of an electrical maintenance group‘s preventive maintenance inspection requirement and we can see how they are progressing monthly in meeting the annual inspection targets. The group has 12 months to complete all inspections. Each month the KPI graph tells us how they perform. Green means inspections complete, red means inspections overdue and blue are inspections remaining to be done not yet overdue. The use of this KPI proved to be highly successful in getting the inspections completed. Previously their assets suffered high rates of breakdown. Investigations identified that barely 80% of condition inspections were being done in a year. Since maintenance is a risk control activity any inspections not completed meant undetected problems that would inevitably lead to failures. When the graphs were made public the persons in charge of resources began to plan and schedule work to meet target dates. Within the first year the overdue inspections fell dramatically and breakdown rates plummeted. Changing behaviour to the right practices is a powerful use of a KPI.