Assess your maintenance and reliability performance

Take this quick assessment of your reliability and maintenance performance to help you clarify what gaps you see in your organization and give you a good idea of what you think your performance is. 

Rate each statement from 0 to 10 based on your organization's use of the systems and practices. We've defined the best practices for each statement to make it easier to evaluate.

1.) We specify, design, and buy assets based on Life Cycle Cost (LCC) instead of lowest cost to buy.

Defined: This means that decisions on what to buy are based on costs to buy and costs to own an asset over its technical life, instead of buying assets solely on purchase price.

2.) We, as a management team, are focusing on the same results.

Defined: Operations, engineering, maintenance, and stores are working toward the same goal. Your organization is jointly focusing on manufacturing performance. Not cutting costs until it sees what results that it gives you.

3.) We have developed and documented a reliability and maintenance policy that includes a 3 to 5 -year improvement plan.

Defined: The policy is communicated to all employees. This means that you have described all essential reliability and maintenance management elements, their key performance indicators, why these are important, how people are being recognized when improving toward goals, the importance of reliability for plant competitiveness, and so forth.

4.) Craftspeople have a high level of skills and frontline supervision adjusts its management style accordingly.

Defined: This means that front line supervisors, team leaders, or coordinators do not need to spend much time instructing people. Instead, they support them through good planning and scheduling of work, identifying individual training needs, organizing this training, coaching root cause failure analysis, and other empowering tasks.

5.) Maintenance crafts people’s work is limited by their skills, not by rigid craft lines.

Defined: This means that you might have only one mechanical craft that includes welders, pipe fitters, machinists, millwrights, etc., and another craft for electricians and instrumentation.

6.) Our level of work management is high.

Defined: Work management includes the key elements of work initiation, prioritization, planning, scheduling, execution, recording and backlog management.

7.) We correctly prioritize work.

Defined: To prioritize work correctly, you must realize the consequences of not doing the work before a given time. Consequences include environmental damage/personal injury, high costs for lost production, and/or maintenance and asset deterioration.

8.) Preventive Maintenance/Essential Care and Condition Monitoring (PM/ECCM) content is right.

Defined: you must base your PM/ECCM content on the consequences of not preventing the failure as mentioned in the previous section. Also, the consequence of a failure must be more “expensive” than the cost of trying to prevent it.

9.) PM/ECCM execution is 100%.

Defined: Having the right content in your preventive maintenance/essential care and condition monitoring (PM/ECCM) program, means there is no reason to have less than 100% completion of the PM/ECCM you have implemented.

10.) 85% of spare parts and materials are delivered to the job site.

Defined: If planning and scheduling are done correctly, the spare parts store will be in a position to effectively deliver spare parts and materials to the job site or to designated areas.

11.) Service level is 97% or more for the spare parts store.

Defined: To maintain a necessary level of trust in your store system, the service levelgetting the right part when you need it-must be very close to 97%. If it goes much below that level, people will lose trust in your store, and to survive, they will start building their own stores without the knowledge of the store’s management.

12.) The technical database including Bill of Materials (BoMs) is 95% or more correct.

Defined: The technical database should always be up to date. Equipment, loop, or electrical circuit identity should be the only thing needed to find and request or purchase spare parts or other information.

13.) The very basics of maintenance are instituted.

Defined: The Basics are: Inspections, Prioritization, Planning, scheduling, good execution with skills and prevention of problems.

14.) Safety standards are very high.

Defined: Without having enough statistical data to make this a proven fact, I am convinced that there is a strong relationship between good maintenance practices and safety performance.

15.) Front-line Leaders (FLL) supervises many people.

Defined: A front Line leader can manage many people when skills are high and planning and scheduling is very good.

16.) Individual training plans are developed and used.

Defined: As a result of a crafts skills and management skills analysis, you will have individual training plans for each craftsperson and manager.

17.) Root cause problem elimination.

Defined: You know which problems you should work on, by priority, and you are continuously designing out problems. Key people are trained in RCPE and FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) methodologies and are using these skills to solve operations, as well as equipment, problems.

18.) Use of time.

On the next page you will find a table that describes typical, good and world-class distribution and time in a maintenance department.

Take some time to study the table and compare (honestly) how your maintenance department stacks up, you may be in for a surprise.

Before you score this, it's necessary to define the categories of work in the table.

• Daily and weekly work means all work you can do independently, whether or not the process is in operation
  
• Shutdown work requires the process to be down in order to do a safe job
  
• Only planned work is work executed after it's been planned, but not scheduled. You take advantage of any shutdown situation.
  
• Only scheduled work is executed as scheduled but not planned.
  
• Break in work is any work added to the schedule after it was closed. As an example, closing time for a schedule should be 19 hours in advance of execution for daily work. Closing time is one week for minor shutdowns (10-12 hrs) and four weeks for a major shutdown.
  

Here is the range of scoring to see how you measured up.