Managing Maintenance Performance within OneSteel

Many organisations have some means for reporting and analysing maintenance performance. The chances are each will use different method to calculate and represent measures making comparison difficult. The reporting can be done using standard spreadsheet applications but this provides an opportunity for data entry error and is time consuming.

OneSteel, one of the largest steel product manufacturers in Australia, adapted the framework used to develop acmPelorus as a standard across its Pipe & Tube operation. In this organisation the framework has been named the Work Management Tool WMT. The WMT has provided them with an efficient vehicle for producing KPI’s and analysing trends. It enables them to drill down from organisation level through plant, planner group and even trade group analysis for the relevant KPI’s. The beauty is the time taken to provide data for the tool is minimal.

After 6 months of use one of the business units reported that:

• The WMT shows in clear graphic form that we are organising and managing work. This provides assistance in achieving reliability and cost goals.
• It highlights how well work management processes are being followed and what areas need focus to improve.
• The WMT helped formalise the use of priority as a means to ensure the right work is done to meet business reliability goals. This has assisted in understanding that fixing a door is not the same priority as completing a PM inspection or a job identified from a PM inspection.

One of those responsible for providing maintenance and reliability support to manufacturing operations within OneSteel has claimed that the WMT helped them in the following ways:

• Minimising the time it takes to compile the KPI’s
• Allowing them to examine KPI’s at all levels, looking for trends that tell a story
• Providing information and hard data which is invaluable when trying to demonstrate the consequence of ineffective maintenance management. For example, a low schedule completion and high level of reactive unscheduled work would lead me to ask whether all the reactive work had to be done immediately, or whether it could have waited to be planned and scheduled.

Using the work management tool has helped the business in the following ways:

• Allows access to KPI’s for 6 different business at once.
• Allows relevant maintenance people to access KPI’s for their areas and manage accordingly
• Provides transparency across the business for the relevant KPI’s
• Promotes uniformity across the business in the methods of carrying out maintenance work

When ask what advice would be given to someone that is thinking about implementing the work management tool in their business the reply was “The WMT is a great tool for generating KPI’s and provides a good vehicle for managing maintenance work. You must understand, however, that like all tools the WMT needs to be utilised efficiently and well to generate value. Firstly everyone must see the measures as useful - they must understand why you are using these measures. The data being input must be valid, the KPI’s must drive the right behaviour, people must use the WMT regularly and individuals must be responsible for the various measures. If these things are happening, the WMT will provide great value to an organisation. For information about how you can establish your own maintenance performance reporting and analysis system contact the acm office.