Hello,

We read about Business Centred Maintenance and that business objectives must be defined/known in order for our maintenance to be aligned and focused along these objectives.

For me this is more theoretical....in practice how is this carried about when we are concerned about failures. What are the business objectives?

cheers

In my company the Business Objectives or Goals are defined / presented by the directors each year. From those goals the different department managers set their own to support the firsts, and the ball continue rolling down to individual goals set to support group, section, department, and company goals.

A goal may be to expand a production facility X, complete a construction project, bring another product to the site. Maintenance set goals to align with those, for example:
* Register all new equipment/instruments related to expansion project X at the CMMS, define the new task lists, adquire the necessary spare parts, setup the PM schedules. align the schedules to execute the firsts PM the same month the area is started up.

* Support the construction project by lending Maintenance Technicians to serve at the commisioning stage as inspectors. Maintenance will gain:
*** Early knowledge about equipment they will service after the start up.
*** Ensure equipment is correctly installed and hopefully avoiding failures due to wrong installation procedures.

* If Company Objectives/Goals are related to increase profit margins or reduce operation costs, what can the Maintenance Department do to contribute with that goal?:
*** Increase number of equipment under RCM / PdM programs
*** Review actual PM program (add, edit, delete activities), review PM frequencies
*** Decrease downtime costs by ...
*** Reduce inventory costs at stockroom by ...
*** Identify equipments which costs of maintenance are high enough to justify replacement
*** Push contracts renegotiations with key suppliers / contractors.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Eugene,

The business goals of your company / your customer will be the driver of your maintenace goals: You need to fulfill the company/customer goals as good as possible under a lot of restrictions (money, time, ...)
So you should derive a strategy and you will control what you achieved to improve the strategy.
If you don't know the destination you will never arrive at it.

Another example:
Business Goal: Budget control
Maintenance Goal: Maintain actual costs within +/- X% of annual budget.
*** (X=0%, X=2%, X=4%, may depend on several factors).

Hello,

Thanks for your contributions.

But....

what if this is a new plant and so you have yet no data for costs, downtimes, etc???

cheers

Well,
* Budget compliance (maintain actual costs within +/- x% of budget) still is valid for a new plant.
* Maintain Plant Availability over 9X.%
* Other goals may be set based on service level, for example:
*** Maintain average time between maintenance notification approval and maintenance order release within 2 days?, 1 day?

KPI for the first year may appear to have been picked "from the air". Maybe you can negotiate to declare the first year as data gathering to establish a baseline and then on second year start setting improvement goals from that baseline.

Hello Rennie,

even if it's a greenfield plant, maintenance will not change to much.
So try to get some comparable KPI (from simular plants, industry KPI, ...)in addition to what the management will tell you (the mentioned budget and availability, maybe something like prductivity).
Then derive your strategy how to fulfill these KPI under the given restrictions and work hard to reach the goals.

Thank you for your advises.

Any suggestions where to find industry KPIs please?

This is a new pharmaceutical plant (solid dose).

cheers

Did you have an industrial/pharmaceutical companies association back there in Malta?

Hi everyone,

I am new to this forum but have some suggestions on business centered maintenance. My view is why not treat maintenance like a business? The goal of any business is to maximuize the outcome while minimizing the input. That is to improve the return on investment.

In maintenance you do this by improving usable capacity, reducing costs and reducing the working capital investment. From this everything else follows.

I could go on about how targeting PM programs is analogous to targeting profitable products in sales and marketing and so on but will wait to see if this is what you are looking for.

Hope this helps.