Operational efficiency in maintenance - Analysis and tools

Many tools and methods exist in the maintenance field to optimize the overall cost of maintenance, such as MBF (reliability-based maintenance), which can be used to build or optimize a maintenance plan, taking into account safety, quality, availability and costs. On the other hand, little is said about improving maintenance organization and processes.

Reorganizing a company's organization and processes has consequences not only for internal and external customers, but also for the company's costs and productivity. Improving productivity requires accelerating all the processes inherent to it. Reorganizing requires analyzing and rethinking processes to achieve better performance faster and more efficiently.

This optimization approach must be applied to industrial maintenance, as it is a production support service. However, it should not be approached from the point of view of speed of execution, which can generate very serious quality and safety problems, but rather from the point of view of time wasted in carrying out maintenance tasks. To improve operational efficiency, the first step is to identify the proportion of Value Added (VA) and Non-Value Added Time (NVAT) in maintenance operations. This step provides a highly operational vision of the efficiency of the company's maintenance organization and processes. The next step is to look for solutions to reduce or even eliminate NVAW. These solutions cover all aspects of maintenance activities. This starts with the organization of working hours and teams, through to the redefinition of the various processes implemented (preparation, execution, acceptance, memorization, reliability, etc.) and also on the material resources made available to maintenance technicians.

Another lever is greater use of new communication and information tools (smartphones, tablets, RFID chips, etc.) to boost productivity and efficiency. Indeed, digital technology can help us to integrate all the components of an intervention into a single structure, making maintenance more efficient.