Preventive Maintenance Process Improvement Towards improved quality standards and enhanced service delivery

The Background:

As part of a Cost Optimization Program Workshop held over October / November 2007, one of the objectives defined was to create a highly efficient Preventive Maintenance (PM) process.

The objective was to improve the standard of service delivery quality by addressing the challenges in the PM process; and the factors leading to inefficiency were analyzed as:

• Many more – 25 – handoffs than necessary
• Unjustified distance travelled – 19 km – per work order
• Inadequate PM routines leading to increased Emergency Maintenance (EM) occurrence by 25%
• Poor PM planning and scheduling
• No visible labels / tags to indicate PM done on equipment
• Lack of checklists and work instructions and subsequent lowering of control on repair works
• Absence of quality checks on jobs performed
• Higher training required for staff

The Solution:

The task group assigned to develop an optimum PM process concentrated on identifying and focusing on critical assets as a priority for PM. They worked on multiple initiatives to address the issues defined in the process; including standardizing and creating visual check-sheets for PM work, creating history cards for all critical equipment to ensure maintenance record; training the PM team on a well-designed schedule via the lecture-demonstration training methodology; and the like.

It was also proposed to monitor PM works and conduct quality checks; and to monitor EM frequency between two PM occurrences. In addition, a measurement process was implemented to track the number of reactive calls and get customer satisfaction feedback on quality of PM works carried out. Cost and quality audits of the PM were also introduced into the system to ensure measurement.

In order to ensure that the procurement process works in line with the new processes, a store management and inventory system was implemented for weekly monitoring of stocks and procurement in advance for all PM-related supplies.

The Benefit:

This initiative has resulted in a dramatically reduced downtime of equipment and reduction in EM calls. The quality of PM works has improved significantly and has led to a much higher customer satisfaction.

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