Engineering Maintenance activities are often seen as a cost, a necessary evil in the persuit of manufacturing goods.
The problem with looking at it this way is everything is cost and budget related.
This is not the best way to build an efficient engineering department and not the best way to get the most from your Assetts or Machines
Even the KPI’s we normally use to track Engineering effectiveness are wrong and push us away from what should be our goal – efficient production.
We need to change this around, align production and Engineering Maintenance with One Clear Goal, the goal of improving efficiencies, improving quality and keeping products moving out of the factory.
Ideally a factory will set one goal, an audacious goal that can be used for every decision made.
If the goal is ‘World Class’ as example every decision can be run through this as a filter.
“Does this decision take us closer to our goal or further away?”
The goal ideally needs to be efficiency related, one that everyone can understand and get behind and every person involved in that endeavour can be measured against.
One endless frustration of mine over many years is the necessity for companies to measure engineering effectiveness on metrics that are not efficiency based and are not drivers of success, cost effectiveness or productivity.
What’s more the metrics used by nearly every Engineering Maintenance department I’ve ever seen are detrimental to successful operation.
The most common metrics have also been proven to be ineffective during multiple studies into it.
The most common metrics used as an engineering KPI are Hours logged and PM completion.
My issue with these are they are task based metrics not goal based ones, or success based. it’s a measurement of how much work an engineering department is doing NOT how successful it is or how it’s pushing the company towards it’s goals.
It’s basically measuring the Engineering Department by how many bits of paper have been filled in!
This mainly is due to viewing Engineering as a cost center but if we look at it from a proactive point of view, why do we do what we do?
It’s much more relevant to class engineering as a profit center.
If engineering is used properly our activities should be income generating for the company.
To do this we need to move away from Breakdown Engineering Services and more towards proactive Mechanical and Electrical Maintenance Services.
Measuring an Engineering Department on how we’ve improved a machines/lines/factories efficiency will give a clear financial figure that can be used to make more intelligent decisions.
as an example if you looked at a sales team as a cost center it would be clear to any accountant looking at the whole that reducing the size of the team saves money.
This obviously would be a daft measurement of a sales team. But still many sales teams have been decimated on this basis and the resulting problems that occured from this cull well documented.
Sales obviously is a profit center and should be measured against the £ produced. Each sales person can easilly be measured against their effectiveness.
So why not apply the same logic to engineering?
If the Engineering Support team is effective the machines push out more product, the company makes more money.
Engineering effectiveness and reliability therefore is a revenue generating task and our engineering support teams should be measured against how successfully they have pushed the business forward.
This is how the top companies view their Maintenance Engineering teams, by shifting the perception and viewpoint of all in the Engineering teams it is easier to focus on the right metrics.
So what are the right metrics?
Obviously as mentioned we want an overall metric = How have we affected OEE?
Focussed improvements or improvement maintenance is one way we can hit our goals.
Looking at more intelligent engineering metrics such as MTTR and MTBF are much better performance metrics assisting Reliability Centered Maintenance
Here are the definitions of the above…
MTTR = Mean Time To Repair. This metric focusses on the mean time it takes the engineering department to repair an asset. Ideally this metric should be trending downwards in a successful Engineering Department.
MTBF = Mean Time Between Failures. This is the mean time between the failures on the equipment, this metric should be trending upwards, increasing the time between the failures.
There are other metrics you can use in Reliability Centered Maintenance but these are the main ones that give you intelligent data regarding your Engineering Teams Effectiveness.
If you have found this post useful please leave a comment or share it with someone who may also find it useful.
