If your maintenance program is misaligned with your mission, resources, or priorities, how can you line it back up? Here’s a way to get started:
Access maintenance records for the past year.
Sort completed maintenance activities by labor cost (or time spent), greatest to least.
Plot the activities on a bar chart, in descending order of labor cost.
Now you can clearly see which activities consume the most maintenance labor. By addressing those activities first, you maximize recovery of wasted resources.
Now, review each activity to see if you should do it less frequently, outsource it, or discontinue it altogether. Answer these four questions:
Why do we want to do this (what’s the gain)?
How does it affect safety or the uptime of critical equipment?
What is required for us to do this properly?
Is this activity a better use of our resources than other things we aren’t doing adequately?
Your computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) should have tools for Pareto analysis (e.g., bar charts) and/or data export. If not, look for a CMMS that does.
