How Maintenance and Production can join forces to improve asset performance

When working towards a common objective, a multidisciplinary team can more easily scope improvement potential and detect bottlenecks sooner (without addressing blame to one department). Although departments have different perspectives and other responsibilities, it will promote transparency and, therefore, true collaboration. The departments (or silos) have to understand that they need each other and that everyone will want the best result for the whole site.

Everything the maintenance department does is to enable production to create as many products of high quality as the customers want. This is where you can find the common ground; good installation performance means good production whereas no production (i.e. bad installation performance) leads to dissatisfied customers. Embracing the common goal can be vital to organizational success.

A favorite KPI to use to this end is Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). The percentage is measured by multiplying availability, performance and quality. All of those OEE parameters are influenced by both Maintenance and Operations with Maintenance focusing on realizing maximum asset availability and reliability and Operations aiming to achieve the best production quality and highest reliability. In other words, the overlapping focus of OEE makes it a good KPI for a joint improvement goal.

Once a common objective has been determined together, the KPIs to measure its success will follow. A shared KPI dashboard can be a great tool to collaborate in. It offers full transparency with standardized insights and preferably includes realistic (internal) benchmarks. One thing to keep in mind is that one condition for success for a shared KPI dashboard is that data from IT and OT systems are connected. While this can be a big task, it is highly recommended to put in the work. This does not only benefit your current situation but is also paramount to accelerating your Digital Transformation as connected data and systems are part of the building blocks to implement or boost the digitalization of your Asset Performance Management.

The KPIs to include in a collective dashboard depends on the shared goal. Some examples that are used in successful companies:

The common KPI dashboard promotes working in one process that both Maintenance and Operations participate in. If you haven’t done so yet, use a risk-based approach to determine the criticality of the equipment; this is not done by Maintenance alone, all disciplines and job levels should be involved. We advise to set up weekly KPI meetings which determine the improvement potential based on the KPI dashboard. Example: if the dashboard shows that several equipment types have unacceptable production loss due to failure the next step can be a joint Root Cause Analysis (first tackling the prioritized equipment of course). After that everyone’s part to solve the issue should be defined before getting the job done. In many successful partnerships between Maintenance and Operations we also see that short daily check ins, in which everyone reports their progress, help to stay on track.

Starting with connected data and systems and tools such as KPI dashboards to process improvements and internal adoption of the new roles, responsibilities and way of working; all of the discussed changes improve your Ability to Perform (better) through a holistic approach to asset performance. Changing to a united way of working for Maintenance and Production takes a big organizational change but can also improve asset performance. This can minimize Total Cost of Ownership while also realizing a higher job satisfaction among your workforce.