Eight percent of your operators are directly responsible for 60 percent of your maintenance dollars spent. I came to this by tracking operationally induced events (OIEs) — maintenance events not caused by the normal operation of the asset. If an asset came to harm by an operator, tenant, student, designer or some other outside force, it was classified as an OIE. The maintenance department did not cause the problem but was tasked to correct the problem.
This number was derived using failure analysis and includes only causes of maintenance proven to have been impacted, over sped, over temped, dropped, under spec’d or intentionally operated to failure.
By tracking OIEs as a simple check box on the work order (WO), a maintenance department can isolate the causes of machine or facility failures and attribute the failure to a specific person, procedure or policy. Once a dollar value has been attached to the cause of the maintenance event, the leadership can create a remedy.
This very large dollar amount is usually a modest number of work orders, but each has a very high dollar value. Of the 8 percent:
- The top 4 percent are operators who do not understand what they are doing wrong. They have not been properly trained. By tracking OIEs the organization can create one-on-one training events to correct a specific behavior or change a procedure (training on the job — TOJ) and is considered to be the most effective form of procedural training. TOJ should not be confused with on-the-job training where a worker is allowed to make mistakes until they get it right. This 4 percent is usually very happy to correct their behavior because they want to improve.
- The other 4 percent do not care about the organization or the assets. Fortunately, half of them are willing to change their behavior to keep their jobs. They change because they know their behavior is being tracked with a dollar value.
- The bottom 2 percent do not care and never will and will continue to wreck your facilities, buildings and equipment, and your maintenance department will never be able to keep up with their damage. They think they are protected. They are husbands, wives or golfing buddies of someone in power and think they do not have to be held accountable. I have seen people hold threatened litigation over the organization for perceived wrongs.
When OIEs and dollar values are tracked, it doesn’t take 90 days to identify the people who are responsible for destroying the organization’s assets. Even in an organization where it is difficult to release people, a person who has been identified as a threat to the facilities, machines, vehicles or safety can be moved to a task where they pose no threat to the organization or safety.
Exact ROI on training
There is one other significant advantage to tracking OIEs. Once the dollar value for a certain type of behavior is known, that is exactly how much you can spend on training to make the problem go away.
One organization had a lady who worked in a lab and was feeding stray kittens around the building. Eventually she was putting out 100 pounds of cat food a month. Her intentions were good; unfortunately, it was attracting rats, raccoons, opossums and armadillos. The maintenance department was constantly filling in holes dug by armadillos to mitigate possible ankle injuries. The health department was worried about rabid animals, rat infestations and fleas. The maintenance department tried for years to get her to stop, yet she would not stop. The maintenance effort required to remedy this was clearly not the fault of maintenance, yet maintenance was expending precious resources to clean up the mess.
She was the wife of a very important director and could not be fired. It was decided the OIE should be tracked.
It didn’t take long before the cats and rats penetrated the basement of the medical building and it had to be cleaned out and fumigated for fleas.
At the next meeting, the WOs were shown to the medical building department director and the feeding had cost his department $13,000 in maintenance and fumigation costs. The feeding stopped immediately. Without tracking OIEs and assigning a dollar value to the cost of feeding, this behavior would have been unmanageable by the maintenance department.
Tracking OIEs allows an organization to identify the specific individuals who are causing damage to the facilities and assets and allows targeted training to make the behavior go away and provides an exact return on investment for the training.
Identifying and managing the 8 percent can make a very significant improvement in the operational readiness of an organization and reduce the maintenance costs.
For more information, contact David Geaslin by email at david@geaslin.com or call (832) 524-8214.
