How to improve maintenance plan compliance

‘Plan attainment’ is an important KPI that you should be monitoring and reviewing regularly. It will show you if your team is successfully executing all your planned maintenance in line with the agreed plan, and if not, why not.

This blog post explores the importance of monitoring your plan attainment KPI, and gives you insight into what could be causing you to underachieve in this area.

Why should you monitor this KPI?

Having visibility of data around your plan attainment can be extremely useful, as it allows you to:

• Drill down and understand why you’re not able to achieve your plan
• Unearth problems you didn’t previously see
• Open up discussions with your team, so you can work together to fix any issues

If it’s clear that you’re not achieving your maintenance plan, it’s important to find out why, so you can unlock efficiencies and improve work execution. We’ve pulled together a few of the most common issues that we have seen with our clients, that could be preventing you from achieving your maintenance plan…

Common factors affecting compliance with your maintenance plan:

• Inefficient and ineffective maintenance strategies

Perhaps you’re suffering from inherited ineffective maintenance strategies that have never been reviewed or optimised based on the asset’s failure data.

“Perhaps you’re suffering from inherited ineffective maintenance strategies”

These strategies may consist of maintenance frequencies that could be extended or need to be increased, the man hours for the maintenance tasks may not be accurate or realistic, or the work instructions may not be detailed enough for the maintenance task to be completed efficiently or correctly.

Reviewing your own failure data and maintenance history, or conducting a benchmarking exercise may be key to unlocking opportunities for optimisation, which will in turn allow for the planned maintenance to be more realistic and achievable.

• Missing or incorrect data in your asset register

Could your asset register have incomplete or incorrect data within it? If so, your team may be unable to properly plan and schedule work because the core foundational data is unavailable to make informed decisions, which ultimately results in work not being executed in-line with your plan.

For example, your maintenance technicians go to do a job, but because the the BoM data is not complete, they realise they don’t actually have the right spare parts to execute the maintenance task. This job is now sitting half done, while the team frantically searches through files to try and find out what parts are required to complete the maintenance task, and to bring the equipment back online. This means that it has not only caused an extended period of equipment outage, but this issue has also delayed the work, which has a knock on effect on the maintenance plan.

“Reviewing and enriching your data could be hugely effective for you”

Reviewing and enriching your data could be hugely effective for you. This will provide your team with the correct information to do their jobs properly and to avoid unexpected delays.

• Poor planning

Take a look at your planning department. The planners are there to decide what work is required, how it is to be done, and the estimated timescales for a job to be completed. But they can only work with the information they have available to them.

Is there a potential that the plans created are unrealistic and unachievable? If jobs haven’t been built correctly, for example if they haven’t identified requirements for isolation or not enough man hours are assigned to the maintenance task, this is likely to result in you being unable to liquidate the work you’re supposed to. And in turn, this would impact your team’s ability to achieve your set plan.

“Could the plan be unrealistic and unachievable?”

It’s key to not only rely on credible foundational data, but to also have regular reviews of your planned maintenance with the planners, schedulers and the maintenance team to ensure that site expertise, knowledge and anecdotal views are incorporated into the maintenance plans.

• Poor scheduling

Another issue could be derived from the way maintenance is scheduled. Schedulers are responsible for allocating when and who will do the job.

For example, if work orders are not being scheduled optimally, by location, package or discipline, this will create conflict in your work scopes, or enable inefficient maintenance to be carried out. This could result in your team possibly being assigned work they are simply unable to do, or equipment being unnecessarily taken “down” on multiple occasions for different maintenance tasks to be completed at different times.

“If work orders are not being scheduled optimally, then it will cause conflict in your work scopes, or inefficient maintenance being carried out.”

Planned maintenance should be set up to be grouped by route (location) or package (planned maintenance that is scheduled at the same frequency on the same equipment skid, location or system). The CMMS will then trigger the work orders together, allowing your team to be more efficient in their execution of planned maintenance.

A top tip from our team:

Define a metric that suits your business for measuring compliance against your “plan attainment”. Regular reviews of this KPI, and it’s contributing factors, will trigger investigation and critical conversations to take place.

This is key for maintenance managers who want to be more effective in their role. By understanding the reasons for non-compliance, realistic and tangible actions can be put in place to help the maintenance team to comply with the maintenance plan.

“Regular reviews of this KPI, and its contributing factors, will trigger investigation and critical conversations to take place.”