Preventive Maintenance Management:

Six Ways to Optimize Your PM System

By Peter Binkley of Solid Blue Development

Facilities directors are a busy lot.  Emergencies seem to arise from nowhere, and coordinating a response takes quick thinking and good leadership skills.  It is little wonder, then, that day-to-day maintenance is often put on a backburner.  Sadly, the more frequently time and resources are diverted from maintenance to handle emergencies, the more emergencies you will have.  Making the absolute most out of every dime spent on labor and materials is therefore the key to solving minor problems before they have a chance to turn into catastrophes.

But how is that accomplished?  In a perfect world, money would always be available to hire the most knowledgeable and hardest-working employees to take up the slack, or to purchase brand new, top-of-the-line equipment and vehicles and toss the old.  In the real world, making the most of what you've already got is far more likely to make the biggest difference.      

Six Ways to Optimize Your Maintenance Operations

1.  Involve shop managers in the day-to-day activities of their shops.

How are shop managers and team leads used in your organization?  Do they really know what is going on in their shops every day?  They'd better, because when there is a problem, shop managers and leads are ultimately responsible.  Perhaps a more relevant question is do they have the tools they need to find out what is going on? 

They should be able to see, at-a-glance, what is going on within their shops at any given moment, or at least, at the end of every day.  If they don't have the manpower to do more than put out fires all day, they ought to be able to document that fact before going to their superiors to request more workers.  Preventive maintenance activities should be reported to them every day along with reports of the day's emergencies, so they can develop a realistic picture of what is and what isn't being accomplished.

2.  Group PM tasks geographically and by skill set.

Traditional preventive maintenance scheduling dictates that this piece of equipment needs to be maintained today and that one over there needs to be maintained next week.  Often, the timing of a PM task is arbitrary, just so long as it is done at the proper interval.  This kind of scheduling can lead to workers traveling from site to site unnecessarily, which is inefficient.  It makes more sense to strategically group tasks for a given shop so that they occur roughly simultaneously for equipment located in the same general area.  Additionally, workers should be able to quickly pull up a list of upcoming tasks for an area, so they can do them if they are headed to the area for an emergency.

3.  Allow workers to set their own schedule.

Possibly the biggest single change you can make to optimize your preventive maintenance operations is to empower workers to manage themselves.  After all, no one truly knows better how work actually gets done, and work ownership can be a major boost to worker pride.  What's more, it removes the burden of micromanagement from managers while, in harmony with tip #1 above, keeping them informed about shop activity.  Tasks could even be assigned to individual workers, ensuring the "best" tasks aren't snapped up by one employee leaving the more work-intensive ones for others.

4.  Make one person responsible for PM oversight.

It could be anyone - a shop manager, an administrative worker, or even a director - but a "PM Manager" overseeing the maintenance activities of all shops on a grand scale would be focused on preventive maintenance efficiency every day.  Once a problem afflicting one shop is identified, its resolution could be employed for all shops, improving operations across the board.  Identifying cost-ineffective equipment, determining a wise hierarchy of shops, tasks, and equipment categories, and ensuring warranties don't expire unexpectedly are all functions for which the PM Manager might be responsible.

5.  Be realistic about what can and cannot be done.

Even the most organized among us forgets to change the oil in his car occasionally, and so it is with all maintenance operations.  All tasks are not created equal and it would be difficult if not impossible to do them all every time they arise, so it is important to do the most critical ones first.  Add the fact that available man-hours can change as frequently as the weather and you see why it is important that the PM system you have in place allows you to adjust priorities quickly.  The most flexible systems would allow you to do this both at the task level and for specific classes of equipment.  Tasks that are done monthly may need to be done every other month in the case of a labor shortfall, or may need to be temporarily dropped from the schedule entirely until the labor shortage is over.

6.  Pick technology that makes the most sense.

A number of preventive maintenance software packages exist for the purpose of creating schedules and tracking costs, but it is important to pick one that fits your particular situation.  Rigid and inflexible designs can sometimes be more trouble than they are worth.  The best systems work in concert with human behavior patterns rather than attempt to change them.  Systems that automatically generate PM tasks that will never be finished skew reporting figures and make it confusing to figure what is actually being done; ones that force workers to perform all tasks that have been missed in order to catch up are similarly confounding. 

Ease of use is always an important factor for any piece of software, but especially so for systems designed to be used by people not accustomed to using computers all day.  If a system is unfriendly, workers, managers, and everyone else will resent having to use it.

Finally, it should be easy to run thorough yet concise reports to keep you informed about your PM activities.  It is important to know that it takes Employee A twice as long to do a task as Employee B so you can start to understand why.  Equally important, you need to be able to compare estimated time and costs with actual ones so you have a realistic picture of the situation.

Conclusion

The best solution for an emergency is its prevention.  The tips listed here ought to be within reach of any maintenance operation regardless of size.  It takes a measure of commitment to optimize your existing preventive maintenance operations, but the long-term returns in increased efficiency, lowered equipment costs, and employees that take pride in their work more than offset the initial effort.