Preventive Maintenance Scheduling:

How Accurate Reporting Can Improve PM Efficiency

By Peter Binkley of Solid Blue Development

How efficient are the preventive maintenance operations in your organization? More importantly, how do you know how accurately you are able to gauge efficiency?

When we talk about efficiency in this context, we refer to a number of people performing regularly scheduled maintenance on a number of pieces of equipment. Because many of these people are also responsible for fixing breakdowns as they occur, it can be confusing in the extreme to figure out how efficient a particular employee might be in regards to PM in particular, or how frequently a particular piece of equipment is being properly maintained.

In order to make informed decisions about PM in your organization, it is critical that you have the tools you need to develop a clear picture of what is and what isn’t being done. Your PM system should be able to tell you at a glance who are your most efficient employees, which items of equipment are nearing the end of their useful life, and what locations on your campus or in your building are the most labor-intensive. If your software isn’t living up to this task, it’s time to look for a new system.

Equipment-Based Reporting

Every organization’s maintenance shop is aware of at least a few notoriously misbehaving pieces of equipment – the air conditioner, golf cart, or toilet from hell. Not only are these “special needs” units soaking up loads of work-hours over the years, they probably also are responsible for an inordinate number of complaints from the people who work near them.

In one office where I worked, there was an infamous free-standing copier that spawned dozens of jokes, normally aimed either at the copier, those who sat nearest it, or one particular fellow who seemed to bring out the worst in it every time he used it.

The copier was pretty old, and it probably should have been replaced long ago. It was well past the point where the costs of repairing it would have more than justified shipping it off to surplus property. The reason it stayed was because management couldn’t see the bottom line – they didn’t have the proper reporting tools, in other words.

Well-designed PM software would have made this copier stick out like a sore thumb. If the data had been collected, it would have been easy to see the number of instances of routine maintenance that this copier had missed, and the number of hours spent on repairs, and who did the repair work, which as we’ll see, can be critical as well.

Another nice way the right software can save you money is by the tracking of warranty information. Proper maintenance, of course, is necessary for many pieces of equipment to stay in compliance with warranty requirements, but staying on top of which item’s warranties will be expiring has an additional benefit: if you have a lemon, you sure would rather the manufacturer make the situation right before the warranty expires and you are stuck with the cost of all repairs.

Employee-Based Reporting

Sometimes PM tasks are like a box of chocolates, not because, as Forrest Gump’s mother maintained, that you never know what you’re going to get, but for another reason – the best pieces are often snapped up by the first person to take a look at the available selection.

One university for whom I designed a PM system had a big problem with what they called ‘windshield time,” that is, employees who would grab for themselves the jobs that would require the most travel time or necessitate frequent trips to pick up parts at the various shops spread around campus. When the new system was in place, “windshield time” dried up pretty quickly.

There were a few reasons for this change, some of which we’ll discuss in a future article; but there is no denying that when mechanics understood that their managers had access to – and were using – detailed reports and summarized data that clearly demonstrated how and where they were spending their time, operations became much tidier and resentment toward those who habitually claimed the choicest PM tasks was much reduced, an added benefit.

Location-Based Reporting

Once you’ve got a good handle on the pieces of equipment in need of maintenance and the persons responsible for doing the work, you can get a little fancy with fine-tuning your PM operations geographically.

It’s an unnecessary waste of time, for instance, for an employee to work on one piece of equipment in one particular area, then have to return to the area later in the week to perform another bit of maintenance on another piece, or even to perform a different task on the same item. By the same token, it’s handy for a mechanic to know if an item needs some maintenance they could perform when they are in the area to fix a problem when an emergency arises.

Many PM systems simply churn out a list of tasks at a regular interval when those tasks come due, be it every day, week, or month. But a much smarter system would allow a shop manager or mechanic to see the data not as the computer wishes them to see it, but as they themselves wish to see it, and allow the users to generate the work requests when they are ready and when doing so makes the most sense. Rigidly designed systems are frequently nearly as troublesome as no system at all.

Conclusion

Increased PM efficiency frees up hours that will create a cascading effect throughout your maintenance operations, allowing you to provide better service for your customers, and that improves the bottom line; make sure you have the data you need to make informed decisions regarding your preventive maintenance scheduling. Invest in a system that provides an accurate portrait of equipment, employee, and location-based PM operations.

In future articles, we will look at the role of shop managers in your organization and how both paper-based and paperless work order systems can take your preventive maintenance operations to a whole new level.