The PM Compliance Trap

The PM Compliance Trap

Metrics drive behavior. Many organizations start with PM compliance in the early stages of their reliability program. This is a good place to start when your organization is 100% reactive and pushes behavior that prioritizes Scheduled preventive maintenance over breakdown maintenance. However, once this metric has been accepted within the organization new behaviors can appear which are as detrimental to the organization as breakdown maintenance. Your organization must start to consider additional metrics in order to prevent these new behaviors from setting in.

PM compliance tracks the completion of PM tasks to their scheduled date, but what about work quality, effective use of resources, and the effectiveness of the PM task itself. To ensure a complete set of measures these other aspects must be taken into account. Multiple metrics must be used to create a balance so that the right behaviors are driven into your organization. For example, the quality of a job plan, how well it is scheduled, and how well the crafts time is used are measures of the quality of your work performance.

The other aspect of this series of metrics is the measurement of the effectiveness of you PM tasks. A craftsman will lose faith in the process and leadership if he performs the same task over and over with no new findings. Craftsman know when a task should be changed or deleted from the system. Using metrics to measure the effectiveness of PM's will give the maintenance organization a way to validate their existing PM's and identify areas of waste. It will also give the crafts an opportunity to provide feedback in their role on the front lines.