Maintenance Strategy Development
A Maintenance Strategy brings all current maintenance practices and operations together with current industry best practice in order to provide a strategic and coherent 'road map' for engineering to follow in order to achieve the following goals:
- Improve service provision to operations i.e. reduce breakdowns and improve productivity
- Control engineering spending and ensure adherence to budgets
- Consistently provide parts for planned maintenance and breakdowns with the lowest spares holding value
- Improve communication between engineering and other business functions
- Ensure engineering compliance to all company and statutory standards and requirements
- To ensure engineering is focused on business objectives
- Enable engineering to take a lead in business development
The Maintenance Strategy is developed by the following process:
- Completion of a Maintenance Audit
- Writing of a Maintenance Audit review document
- Completion of a benchmarking exercise
- Utilise all available information to develop a relevant and effective Maintenance Strategy
The Maintenance Audit
Strategic Maintenance Planning has developed a unique maintenance audit and review process for management to analyse the maintenance function from within the overall organisation taking into account all the various functions within the organisation. The purpose of a maintenance audit is to derive a maintenance strategy, which aims to deliver improvements to the general maintenance function, provide clearer communications and to develop a set of Best Practices for the maintenance function.
This work is accomplished through the completion of interviews with a wide cross-section of personnel from all functions.
Maintenance Audit Review
The maintenance audit has been designed to determine thoughts of individuals and groups and ensure the following objectives are reached:
- A snapshot of the current engineering function, allowing the current situation to be benchmarked
- An accurate assessment of other company functional perceptions of engineering performance
- To identify areas of functional weakness to allow improvement strategies to be planned and executed
- To provide a ground work of information for the development of a Maintenance Strategy
The audit is completed with departmental functions outside the engineering function to ensure that a balanced and wide-ranging result is achieved. Essentially engineering, production and administration responses are investigated in isolation and then general perceptions and themes identified within the conclusions.
All information from the maintenance audit is organised into a document that provides a distillation of the perceptions and thoughts of the respondents.
Benchmarking exercise
In order to provide a wider industry perspective to the results of the Engineering Review and to provide additional groundwork for the development of the Maintenance Strategy, a bench marking exercise is carried out.
To complete this exercise, critical "Hard" (systems and processes) and "Soft"(human resources and organisation structure) issues within the engineering function are rated and tabled against our experience in wider industry.
Maintenance Strategy
Utilising all information generated, a Maintenance Strategy is developed for the engineering function. The strategy has three main sections:
- Detail of how the implementation of a Maintenance Strategy integrates with and facilitates the organisation Business Plans and goals.
- Provision of an overall Maintenance Strategy.
- Detailing current best practice, providing a basis for development to working methods
Implementation of the Maintenance Strategy will deliver
- The Maintenance Strategy will dictate direction
- There will be an Engineering Charter to set service levels to operations
- There will be the use of appropriate Maintenance Methods
- Engineering Resource Organisation will reflect the needs of the business
- There will be appropriate levels of Human Resource
- There will be use of Best Industry Practice
- Project Engineering will adopt a life cycle asset management approach
- There will be compliance with all company systems and standards
- There will be auditing of performance
- There will be Continuous Improvement
Finally, the key elements of the Maintenance Strategy will be distilled into a prioritised plan for implementation.
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