In most businesses, success is easily measured by looking at the bottom line; but what’s the bottom line in the maintenance business? To better understand how to evaluate maintenance business performance, it’s helpful to examine how businesses generate profits. Quite simply, businesses generate profits by providing goods and/or services at minimum cost and sold at a fair market price. Obviously, revenues generated from sales must exceed the costs. It is important to note that the customer determines the fair market price.

Reliability is not rocket science. It should be easy to achieve. Do things right the first time, from design, procurement, construction, installation, maintenance and operation, all the way through to decommissioning. Isn’t this the goal of engineers? Still, in many cases we —industry in general—seem to struggle in achieving high reliability. One reason may be widespread inattention to Mechanical Quality Assurance (MQA).

“Maintenance is a thankless job”, this is repeated by us every time and also sometimes, use it as a tool to be with the maintenance person. Many a times it’s true. We don’t appreciate their efforts as we cannot get their direct results like the sales showing their numbers, production showing their targets achieved and crossed.  The maintenance data is also recorded, tracked, presented and analysed, but it is viewed and understood only whenever the production or sales targets are missed due to some failure of the machine. In other words, we  try to understand the maintenance data with negative approach and to understand its impact on the business loss.

Novozymes North America, Franklinton, North Carolina, a company with Scandinavian roots and management style won the coveted North American Maintenance Excellence Award (NAME) 2000. A reporter (Michael Lippig) recently paid Owe Forsberg, Maintenance Manager, Novozymes North America, a visit to see how this came about.

Baby Boomers are going to retire soon. There won’t be enough skilled labor to fill all the jobs. Employers aren’t prepared to handle the labor shortage. It goes on and on. So, is this workforce shortage thing for real? Well, YES! The numbers don’t lie. By 2012, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) estimates there will be 165 million jobs and only 162 million people available in the workforce.

Corporations throughout the world are losing billions of dollars in wasted project spending, and this waste is being carefully hidden from management and investors. A new global research report shows that one of the biggest contributing factors is the lack of alignment of projects with corporate strategy.

The current economic climate dictates that cost management is a critical activity for many companies and their managers. Maintenance is very often seen as an area where cost cutting targets can be easily and quickly achieved. Many maintenance managers take the view that this type of philosophy always ends up with increased costs in the future. This is not true in many cases. 15 years of analysis and review of maintenance programs by the author shows that most maintenance departments are more reactive than they should be and because of this, they over spend and underperform.

Christer Idhammar of IDCON INC presents the implementation steps you need to take if you want to be successful in improving reliability and maintenance, sustain that improvement, and continue to improve after that.

The concept of Best Practice is easy to describe and discuss – the more difficult part is determining your path towards reliability and maintenance Best Practice and more importantly, sustaining standards and developing a continuous improvement culture.