Plant Maintenance - Work Management

Work Management processes are all following the same principals and even though some minor idiosyncrasies exist between industries the high-level principals remain consistent. Some supply chains are more successful than others when it comes to performing Work Management. If the processes are fairly the same, then why are some of us more successful than others? To answer this lets first look at some key performance indicators (KPIs) that could be used to analyze the success of our work management processes.

Proper analysis of the work management process must include indicators that analyze key areas across the entire process. This means that we must look at all the main processes from identifying work all the way to feedback and closure. For the purpose of this discussion, we will just focus on a few KPIs that will assist in indicating whether the work is under control or the supply chain is in firefighting mode.

Five indicators can be used for an initial health check are:

1. Backlog - All outstanding and uncompleted work regardless of the date.
2. Capacity Loading (Resource Utilization) -The metric measures the time scheduled in the week as % of the total available resource time.
3. Schedule Attainment - This calculates whether maintenance was completed as planned.
4. PM Attainment - The metric measures whether Strategy and Statutory orders are completed within a specified period
5. Schedule Breakers (Breakdowns) - This measures the number of schedule breakers.

There are many other additional indicators that are used to analyze the work management process but the five mentioned above can be used to quickly identify possible issues.

How To Achieves Results

The Reveal's methodology has key principals that can assist the business in achieving improved results by optimizing their current process. The high-level objectives should be to:

• Understand and know the areas of concern
• Formulating a clear strategy on how to address the opportunities
• Create an environment of cross-functional communication
• All the levels of reporting in the company agree to the targets and work towards the same goals

By understanding the concerns and the formulation of a clear strategy on how to achieve your goals you will be able to accurately identify new issues and quickly react accordingly. A stable work management process has many benefits, to name a few:

• Technicians/mechanics have a stable work environment
• Increased trust levels between the key areas e.g. maintenance, production, planning and supply chain
• Increase in plant availability and production stability
• Lower supply chain costs due to proper lead times, accurate planning and execution

The main objective is to get control of the work and not allowing the work (Backlog) to control us. In the next article of our blog series, we will touch on some key principals that could be used to facilitate the process of improving work management.