Assessing the Use of Maintenance Best Practices

“We have best practices for sale that will transform your business operations,” so touts the marketing media that you are inundated with every day. Go to an industry conference and the unrelenting stream of “best practice,” trumpeting continues.

But suggested best practices are real things with real value. You get to decide which makes sense to investigate. Look at any Operations and Maintenance manual from an equipment manufacturer. While over time you might modify their suggestions, they do provide a foundation to begin maintaining the equipment. They are a framework that can help ensure you are not missing something. Start there and adjust as you gain experience.

Educate your team

Where to begin? The obvious place is drawing upon the many years of experience your team has. Maybe you have a line on a source of best practices (perhaps from a conference) that you can share with them. Get their input. This is not necessarily you who are educating them, but rather all of you together educating each other. Spend an hour or two for a few weeks focusing on the different areas of your business. Look for a connection between them and the perceived best practices you are finding out there in the industry.

Score your situation

Find a way to compare your process/practices with your newly discovered best practices. If you have deemed a BP worthy of your attention and would bring value to your operation, then rank yourself against it. Something simple like 1, for we follow it totally, 2, we are close, or 3, we are not sure what they are talking about.

Most likely you will have a smattering of 2’s and 3’s and maybe a couple of 1’s. If your workforce holds certifications from industry standards bodies, then you may find quite a few 1s in your data set.

Now you have a place to begin investigating which best practices to apply given your position relative to them. Don’t apply 5-10 all at once… pick 1, maybe 2.

Benchmark against your peers

If you are active in User/Practitioner Communities either related to your industry or the tools you use, go find some people to talk to. Show them the best practices you are considering and ask if they have experience with them… both the good and the bad. Be warned: You will come away with an equal amount of yays and nays in your knowledge bucket. That’s ok. What matters is you have more data to base decisions.

Develop improvement recommendations

Gather your team again and outline how you plan to implement the selected best practices. Don’t actually do them yet, rather hand-fly what they will look like from the perspectives of all involved. Some elements may be easy to envision, while others may be tricky.

It is important that any change, no matter how big or small must have value to the business. Yes, small changes can have big results and big changes can have small, yet important results. You will need this perspective when you perform the next step.

Develop a business case to proceed

You are going to need some investment from someone to implement your version of the best practice, so you need to develop a business case. While you and your team think something is a good idea, you might need to convince a few levels up the chain to begin. Seek who(m) those sponsors might be and make the pitch to them. Executives like predictability and low risk, so work towards stating your case in a language they will understand.

Make it so!

Get right to it! Do not delay in beginning your implementation of the best practice. You may have already spent several months getting to this point, so time is now your enemy. Your sponsor(s) are going to want to see results quickly. Sure, low-hanging fruit are nice early wins, but there is only so much of it. You will need to be pulling the good stuff from deep within the tree in very short order.

Keep the team focused. Take notes about the good and the bad. Be ready to do an after-action review so you can all learn from the experience and make the next one better. Celebrate appropriately and move to the next one.

See, you now are aware of a best practice!

The process I just described could be considered a best practice in the area of process improvement…a best practice for best practices. I should write a book.

TRM and IDCON have worked with many clients across industries to implement tools and methods in support of their best practice goals. We have the experience to help you move the concepts and details of a best practice into processes and software, solidifying them into your operation. Make contact and let’s see how we might be able to help.

John Q. Todd, Sr. Business Consultant / Product Researcher at TRM. Reach out to us at AskTRM@trmnet.com if you have any questions or would like to discuss deploying MAS 8 or Maximo AAM for condition-based maintenance/monitoring.