How to Achieve Maintenance Excellence

When an organization achieves maintenance excellence, it transitions its maintenance function from a cost center to a profit center and realizes the following results:

• Improved Mechanical Uptime
• (World-Class Standard: 98%)
• Increased Capacity & Reliability
• Minimized Maintenance & Conversion Costs
• Optimized Inventory
• (Reduces equipment downtime by up to 25%.)
• Mitigated Risk to Quality, Safety & Property Loss

However, achieving maintenance excellence is not easy. As Prentice Cawley, Director of Engineering & Mfg. Innovation at Dessert Holdings in Lees Summit, MO, explains,

“Maintenance is a game of chess. Everything else is checkers.

— Prentice Cawley

What this means is that the maintenance function is complex and has many variables that need to be managed. Some of these items include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Accounting
• Accounts, Cost Centers, Departments, Expense Classes
• Assets
• Availability, Buildings, Downtime, Equipment, Failure Analysis, Labor Hours, Locations, Repairable Spares, Root Cause Analysis, Spare Parts Lists, Systems, Utilities
• Health, Safety & Environmental (HSE)
• EPA, OSHA, Regulatory, Sustainability
• Inventory
• Availability, Check Outs, Cycle Counts, Min. / Max., Parts, Stock Locations, Tools, Vendors, Warehouses
• People
• Availability, Certifications, Contractors, Customers, Maintenance / Facilities Employees, Operators, Requestors, Skills
• Purchasing
• Blanket POs, Check Outs, Cycle Counts, POs, Receiving, Requests, Returns, Stocking
• Technology
• CMMS, IIoT, Instrumentation & Controls, Plant Floor Networking, Robotics
• Work
• Calibrations, Lubrication Routes, PdMs, Planning & Scheduling, PMs, Projects, Requests, Work Order Generation & Updates

This is only part of the picture. Additionally, maintenance managers are also responsible for, but not limited to, continuous improvement, customer satisfaction, and minimizing costs. Furthermore, they sometimes lack top management support. If this is the case, Maintenance is a single pawn against the other side (king, queen, rooks, bishops, knights, pawns) in a game of chess which is not an inspiring picture.

Welcome to the World of Maintenance!

With so many items on a maintenance manager’s plate, how can one focus on improvement let alone maintenance excellence?

If achieving maintenance excellence is a goal of yours, look no further, CMMS Data Group is here to help. Bill Mountjoy, a leading maintenance and reliability industry expert, was recently hired as VP of reliability engineering to build a reliability engineering division. One of its 1st products is the Maintenance Excellence Status Assessment™ (MESA™). MESAs let you and your organization know where to start or improve your current maintenance excellence journey. It’s a comprehensive, onsite evaluation assessing the 15 functional building blocks of maintenance excellence and delivers the following items to help you and your team achieve maintenance excellence:

• Executive Summary
• Scoring Summary & Gap Analysis
• Customized Master Project Plan (Tasks, Timelines & Required Resources)

The 15 Building Blocks of Maintenance Excellence

The 1,000-point quantitative and qualitative assessment determines if your maintenance function has the proper policies, procedures, tools, and operational alignment to establish itself as a profit center. The total impact of your company’s operations on maintenance excellence is evaluated and strengths and gaps are identified.

“Maintenance is not an easy job to do well, but with the right strategy and focus, it can be very rewarding for the entire operation. We’re here to help you and your organization deliver those benefits.

— Bill Mountjoy

Select the following button to watch the video (led by Bill Mountjoy) explaining what a MESA is:

‍