The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Maintenance Organizations - HABIT 2

Habit 2 – “Begin with the End in Mind”

This is the habit of leadership—both personal and organizational—and leading yourself and the organization toward your goals. Dr. Covey professes that everything is created twice—once in the mental realm and then a second time in the physical realm. By first developing a clear mental vision of our desired results, we will be able to create the necessary steps to achieve that vision. Habit two is all about creating that vision.

Effective maintenance organizations have taken the time to create strategy plans for various aspects of their organizations. Here are some of those areas and questions that should be asked:

Maintenance Strategy: Does a run-to-failure or a reactive strategy make sense to your organization? Do you want your jobs planned and scheduled in advance? Who in your organization should decide which equipment gets repaired first? What should the decision be based on—criticality of the equipment and job priority or the squeaky wheel supervisor?

Reliability Strategy: Are you going to use predictive methodologies on all of your equipment to which it applies? Or, are you going to apply it only to certain systems? Will you use on-line monitoring, or route-based monitoring? Are quantitative PMs being utilized now, and if not, do you plan on applying the resources to scrub your PMs and make them better? Do you use/will you use reliability engineers?

Material Strategy: Will you have a lean storeroom, or a storeroom that never suffers stock outs? Will you enter bill-of-material (BOM) data into your computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) ahead of time or as you make entries for specifically used equipment? Who’ll enter that data? What about kitting or vendor managed inventories (VMI)?

Employee Strategy: Have you identified the skills your employees need to perform their jobs? Do you know which employees have those skills and which don’t? Are you going to hire for new skills, use contractors, or train your existing employees in the new skills they need?

It’s obvious that having the answers to these questions in advance can head off major future issues.

When You Begin with the End in Mind—an end that entails an efficient and effective maintenance organization, that utilizes its CMMS to the fullest, that plans and schedules jobs in advance, and engineers the root cause of failures out of their equipment—you will see the earliest rewards for your efforts and investments. Keep in mind, those rewards are not only financial as shown here, but are also quality-of-life issues, i.e., no more calls in the middle of the night on a weekend. A well run Maintenance department should be boring.