Maintenance surveys or audits are a sensible first step to understanding just how effective and efficient your current systems are. Normally they are carried out by a third party to a preset format evaluating against set criteria. A certain standard asset management audit is in wide usage and serves as a good example; developed in the 1980’s in conjunction with the then DTI this survey was long held as the benchmark and some big organisations have and still use it as either a baseline or a starting point for their own surveying standard.
I have done work for some of these big organisations and tried to help them satisfy the measures prescribed by established audits. Some audit techniques were in their time a leap forward in quantifying through survey how your performance measured up. It is still an effective tool for those starting out to measure performance but like a lot of ‘standards’ some users find it difficult to relate to certain aspects of it and often those that adopt its measures religiously, without realising the benefits it mirrors end up satisfying the old adage ‘what you measure is what you get’.
Maintenance surveys or audits (sometimes referred to as maintenance strategy reviews) have been an integral part of what CSA deliver for over 10 years. In fact CSA advocate a survey as the first step of any strategy or strategy related work they undertake. Colin Sanders worked with Paul Wheelhouse on refining a World Class Web assessment with scoring assigned on a scale of 0-5 for the following categories:
a) Strategy and Policy;
b) Organisation;
c) Communication;
d) Employee involvement;
e) Workload Management;
f) Maintenance Regime;
g) Safety Health and Environment;
h) Materials Management;
i) Value Focus;
j) Measures of Performance.
A score of 5 in any category represents best current practice. Very few organisations exhibit maximum scores in all categories.
This highly visual output of the maintenance survey results against best practice enables you the client to visualise where you sit and more importantly where performance can be improved. It is impractical and uneconomic in most circumstances to aim immediately for world class performance in every category. Typically CSA will help you identify the areas that will bring the most benefit to your organisation and then compare the current characteristics that led to the initial score to the characteristics that have to be attained to improve that score. We then help to move your organisation to that target.
How is this different to the standard surveys?
Improving a score on a maintenance survey is not the be all and end all of maintenance improvement, improved reliability, availability and customer satisfaction are.
CSA have implemented cost effective maintenance improvement programs for many leading manufacturers. For a no obligation initial chat; please complete the form and we will be happy to contact you to discuss how we may be able to help you.