How to Manage Metrics as an Electrical Maintenance Organization

The best, most effective, and most efficient maintenance organizations are data-driven — and so are some of the worst.

In the former case, they use key performance indicators (KPIs) to help them gauge their performance. For example, if the mean time between failures has been trending down, they will look into it to see if that’s actually meaningful. Maybe it’s not, so perhaps they allow a higher failure rate by letting some equipment run to failure and then use the saved resources to keep the most productive (highest revenue) or critical equipment more in its optimal zone (e.g., reduced variance, reduced scrap rate, longer runtime, etc.).

In the latter case, they focus on a handful of KPIs at most — sometimes only one. For example, they may thinly apply (overextend) resources to reduce downtime across all equipment while allowing scrap rates of high revenue equipment to unnecessarily rise due to lack of proper maintenance attention.

At one plant, a new maintenance manager had learned during his job interview there was a high degree of concern about needing to upgrade the skill levels of maintenance personnel through training. So he sent as many people to as much training as possible within the training budget he had. This meant leaving out some needed training due to the cost in favor of unneeded training that was cheap. What he didn’t understand is it’s not individual metrics that count. What really counts is how well the maintenance department can keep product flowing out the door while keeping the plant safe, clean, and efficient.

One metric that gets misused is total downtime. One way to quickly reduce total downtime is to avoid taking equipment down for necessary maintenance. Often, this approach is pushed by short-sighted individual production managers. The smart ones insist on investing in scheduled downtime so that the unscheduled downtime is what’s minimized. They will often ask about what else might be done to extend total availability and if that entails planning for additional downtime they will do it.

Many maintenance managers view reactive maintenance as 100% bad, and they like to see reactive maintenance hours as close to zero as possible. This is misguided. Running certain equipment to failure is the most cost-efficient way to allocate maintenance resources. If you have enough redundancy built in, a single failure will hardly be felt. You just replace the failed item. Examples include sump pumps, lighting ballasts, and exhaust fans. These often run for many years or even decades with no maintenance and are not expensive to replace.

Maintenance response time is a good metric to try to optimize, but the response has to be meaningful. Simply answering a radio call and showing up to look at the equipment then walking off after doing nothing is technically a response, but so is yanking people off existing downtime calls to hop onto the latest one — and neither response is helpful.

A good way to work with this metric is to have a designated person available to respond quickly to any trouble call. This person then makes a determination, mentally calculating what’s needed, who might be available, and which equipment gets priority. All the while keeping the production people informed as to what the constraints are, who is tied up with what, and what this or that priority is being assigned. And it’s open to negotiation depending on what production wants the most. A crew leader, lead tech, or supervisor is best in this role.

A metric to handle with extreme care is “maintenance costs.” Often when things get tough, the first thing some wag in the corporate home office wants to do is “cut maintenance costs.” After investing many hours into detailed analysis, isn’t it amazing that they always come up with exactly 10% as the amount to trim the maintenance budget? A better figure to present to management is “maintenance ROI.” That’s a tricky figure to come up with, so almost nobody does and you’re back to the blind cost-cutting. To do it, you need to know three things for each piece of equipment and then add up the total for all equipment combined:

1. Revenue produced per hour.
2. The cost of the maintenance performed.
3. Hours saved per year per maintenance done.

The production department can tell you the first number. You can get the second from your CMMS. To get the third, you’ll have to use actual maintenance data (from your CMMS), failure analysis reports, and some engineering judgment.

The difference between a cost and a return on investment is significant, both in terms of how maintenance is perceived and how maintenance is managed. If you are presenting a maintenance ROI figure to management, that perspective is going to drive maintenance to be more efficient, innovative, and responsive. You’re not looking to avoid a budget reduction; you are looking to increase what the company gets for every dollar it spends on maintenance.