Effective maintenance contributes to the overall performance of the company :
- Better reliability and availability of equipment, measured with indicators such as TRS, MTBF, MTTR
- Improved production quality (example: non-quality caused by faulty equipment)
- Impact of maintenance efforts on operational costs
Deploying a continuous improvement system makes maintenance more efficient.
What are the maintenance performance levers?
For maintenance, we can distinguish 4 work axes having an impact on SQCDE performance (Safety, Quality, Costs, Deadlines, Teams):
- The maintenance policy aims to align the operational teams with the company’s strategy,
- The organization makes it possible to optimize operational synergies according to the maintenance policy, to create the conditions for Make or Buy arbitration, or to answer the question of critical size by business / specialization,
- The skills that must be developed to meet the needs of the chosen organization (tend towards versatility for maintenance teams, develop level 0 maintenance for production teams, provide new maintenance methods)
- The processes, which once formalized in a simple and clear way, make it possible to streamline operations by processing the bottlenecks of operations, or even by optimizing the planning of maintenance operations.
Measure your level of maturity to build your roadmap
An audit on the 4 axes mentioned above makes it possible to measure the level of maintenance performance. It’s about knowing what is working well, and conversely what needs improvement. External benchmarks allow the performance of maintenance to be compared with best practices elsewhere. The self-assessment should also allow the teams to be involved from the start, using participatory work and facilitation methods, to bring out irritants and ideas.
The self-assessment carried out makes it possible to set objectives to be achieved progressively and to build a roadmap to follow, around the 4 areas of work mentioned above.
Audit yourself to maintain your roadmap (continuous improvement)
Building a roadmap is not enough to achieve the goals. Throughout the journey, you must continually assess yourself in order to measure your progress against the roadmap, using standards to maintain progress. Continuous improvement requires special attention to facilitation and fieldwork with teams. A participatory approach, in the field, facilitates support for change. To do this, setting up visual management makes it possible to measure and share the progress made on the various axes.
