At ECONS, applied Business Process Management takes on a myriad of forms. As part of our assessments and improvement plans, we apply continuous improvement techniques and technology that transcend industries, recognizing that qualified and experienced resources can be a source of cross-sector benchmarks that are essential for public agencies to achieve their goals. This was our experience as part of an ongoing improvement overhaul of an facility maintenance program.
ECONS resources participated in a maintenance program improvement project for a government agency. The main symptoms; increasing corrective work aging, preventive maintenance metrics not representative of the realities experienced at the facilities, questionable data integrity and lack of specific improvement actions. ECONS consultants conducted an initial assessment and identified a number of issues, from the use of poorly designed metrics that promoted inappropriate reporting practices, a lack of efficient planning and scheduling practices, and a lack of support systems.
Maintenance program activities to resolve issues:
- Field visits to review the accuracy of the equipment inventories, as this was the base for the PM orders generated. We also observed in detail a sample of the practices of the maintenance crews, conducted interviews and compared these with the routing sheets and time standards in order to establish a variant. We found a 13% inventory inaccuracy and times over-estimated by up to 46%.
- Review of the metrics, the calculation methods, assumptions, data sources, reporting and general data management practices. Also, evaluated the PDCA process to establish improvement actions.
- Reviewed of the Planning and Scheduling practices by the maintenance coordinators and the discrepancies between regional practices
- Established a root cause analysis process for open corrective actions that allowed the teams to dive into the causes. About 50% of the orders were held by internal procurement and financial processes or by vendor services.
- Review current standard operating procedures against the current and expected practices. All procedures were found to require update.
Satisfactory results obtained with the maintenance program:
- A Center of Excellence was implemented with a Planning Office with Capacity Analysis Capabilities and KPI status reports and an Office for External Services Coordination that provides monitoring and resolution to delayed caused by external factors to the operation, relieving managers and supervisors from administrative, non-value added work.
- Reduced the KPIs from 15 to 7 essential ones, improved data accuracy and calculation methods and automated dashboards with KPIs tracking and drill down through PowerBI, connected to SAP through the Business Warehouse module to minimize manual work.
- 15 operating procedures were updated with improvement actions incorporated; consolidated similar processes and removed outdated documents.
- Updated Maintenance Instructions, developed based on user feedback, in order to reduce standard times by 20%.
- Corrected equipment system inventory discrepancies
Conclusion
A problem and customer specific approach has been key in ECONS providing solutions that are of true value, instead of theoretical one. In this case, this included comprehensive process reviews, data analysis and organizational assessments. The use of resources skilled in specific skills, such as planning, sourcing, SAP systems, project management and quality systems gave us the best chance to use experience to bring best practices to the customer and execute the implementation of improvement actions.
The use of technological, workflow and data visualization tools by qualified personnel helped us be more precise when carrying out processes and managing their data. Our solutions are based on the implementation of automation to reduce costs and improve work time.
Our impact to the organizational structures was a significant change that required delicate change management, communication and relationship trust-building.
This was a holistic solution that brough best manufacturing and maintenance practices from private sectors into the public one with a sensible, pragmatic approach.
ECONS harnessed the Power of Experience and Execution to improve the services provided by our customer!
