Learn something new every time you visit
Work order aging: the backlog you stop seeing
Pull up the active work order list and sort it by creation date. Somewhere near the bottom you will find orders raised six months ago, a year ago, some older still. Nobody cancelled them. Nobody finished them. They just aged, quietly, while newer ...
Vendor managed inventory: handing the routine restocking to your suppliers
A storeroom clerk spends half her week reordering nuts, bolts, cable ties and lubricants. She counts them, raises purchase orders, chases deliveries and puts them away. Every hour on that is an hour not spent cycle-counting, rationalising duplicat...
Utilisation time: how much of the clock you actually choose to use
A facility runs one eight-hour shift, five days a week. The equipment inside it is immaculate: it rarely breaks down, it makes good product, and whenever it runs, it runs well. On every maintenance measure, the team is doing its job.
Uptime: the honest count of hours your asset was genuinely working
At the end of the month someone asks how the packaging line did. The operator says it ran well. The planner says a lot of time was lost. The maintenance coordinator says there was only one real breakdown. They are all describing the very same mont...
Unscheduled downtime: the price of being caught by surprise
It is two in the morning on a Tuesday when the shift supervisor's phone rings: a gearbox has seized and the packaging line has stopped dead. There is no job order, no kitted parts, no team standing by. By the time someone is called in, the right s...
Unplanned work: the honest measure of how reactive you still are
A bearing seizes at two in the afternoon. Nobody has the right part on site. A supervisor starts ringing round vendors, a planner is pulled off three jobs in progress to help expedite, and two mechanics stand idle while the right seal is hunted do...
Total maintenance cost as a share of asset value: the benchmark corporate asks for first
Two plants in the same business, much the same age, sit side by side in a spreadsheet. One spends what looks like a fortune on maintenance. The other spends noticeably less. On the raw figures the first plant is the spendthrift and the second is t...
Total effective equipment performance: the score that counts every hour you own
Your OEE score looks respectable. The machine runs well when it runs, quality is solid, the speed is close to design, and the production team feels good about the asset. Then the finance director looks at the same machine and sees something comple...
Total downtime: the honest sum of every hour you lost
At month end the operations manager pulls the production report, and the totals are lower than anyone expected. The equipment seemed to be available most of the time. Then someone actually adds up the hours the asset was stopped: the planned maint...
Systems covered by criticality analysis: are you maintaining what matters, or just what shouts loudest?
The planner is building next year's budget, and she needs to know where to aim it: which machines deserve the most spares, the closest watch, the tightest inspection routine. The asset register lists more than eighteen hundred systems, and not one...
Stores inventory turns: is your storeroom money working or just sitting?
A plant manager walks the storeroom and notices shelf after shelf of bearings, seals and filters that have clearly not moved in a long time. The bins are full, the dollar value on them is large, and yet the crew still occasionally runs short of th...
Storeroom transactions: is your storeroom staffed for the workload it actually carries?
The storeroom has two clerks and a supervisor. On busy days the counter queue stretches back into the aisle, orders pile up in the receiving bay, and cycle-counting falls behind. On quiet days the team catches up. Nobody really knows whether two c...
Storeroom records: does each clerk have a manageable catalogue to look after?
Two clerks look after a storeroom with 5,800 unique stock records. Each record stands for a part that needs a correct description, an accurate quantity, a sensible reorder point, and a designated bin. When records are poorly maintained, searches f...
Stocked spares value as a share of asset value: is your storeroom an asset or a liability?
Walk into a storeroom that nobody has questioned in a decade and you can read its history on the shelves. There are parts that have not moved since the plant opened. There are duplicates, bought because the first one could not be found. There is a...
Stock outs: how often a technician leaves the storeroom empty-handed
A technician arrives at the storeroom counter with a work order. The part is listed as stocked. But the bin is empty, and the job cannot proceed. The equipment waits, the crew waits, and a small gap in inventory has just quietly become a productio...
Standing work orders: the convenience that quietly blinds your data
Every Monday the lubrication technician charges four hours to a single work order that has been open since January. So do the housekeeping crew, the training hours, and the handful of minor adjustments that never felt worth a formal order of their...
Scheduled downtime: the planned price of healthy equipment
On Thursday afternoon the planner locks in next week's schedule. On it: a compressor service, a pump bearing replacement, a conveyor alignment. Each will take its machine offline for a measured block of time, and every one of those blocks is time ...
Schedule compliance (work orders): did the jobs you committed to actually get done?
The weekly schedule listed 135 work orders. By Friday, 113 of them were done on time. Another 45 emergency jobs had also been completed, but those were never on the schedule. They broke in.
Schedule compliance (hours): did the crew's time go where the plan said?
The planner produces a tight schedule every Friday. On paper, 675 of the next week's 800 available crew hours are committed to specific jobs. By the following Friday, just 482 hours of that scheduled work are done. The rest was swallowed by emerge...
Rework: the maintenance hours you spend undoing your own mistakes
A pump comes back from the repair bench and goes in on Monday. By Thursday it has failed again. The crew groan but say little beyond "it just wasn't right". A fresh work order is raised, parts are pulled, and four more hours disappear before anyon...
Ready backlog: how many weeks of go-now work your crew has waiting
The scheduler sits down on Monday to build the week, and half the jobs on the list are not really buildable: parts still on order, a permit not yet drawn, a scope not yet worked out. The crew ends up filling the gaps with whatever is to hand, and ...
Reactive work: how much of the week gets hijacked by emergencies
It is Tuesday morning and the planner has the whole week mapped out. Then the packaging line trips, and within the hour three technicians have been pulled off scheduled jobs to deal with it. By Friday the planned work is barely half done, and nobo...
Proactive work: the clearest sign your prevention programme is real
Two plants run the same equipment. One runs its vibration routes, sticks to every preventive schedule, and acts on the defects those checks turn up. The other means to get to the preventive work, just as soon as things quieten down.
Preventive maintenance hours: how much of your team's time goes to scheduled prevention
Every Monday a crew works through the weekly preventive routes: lubrication points, belt tensions, filter swaps, the round of visual checks. It is methodical, unglamorous work, and nobody ever won an award for it. Yet those hours are a deliberate ...
Repeat Equipment Failures: How to Find What the First Fix Missed
The same bearing goes for the third time this year. A failure that keeps coming back is telling you the first answer was incomplete, and it usually fails in one of four ways.
Root Cause Analysis: A Short Method for When There Is No Time for the Long One
Formal root cause analysis needs a room, a facilitator and half a day. Most failures never clear that bar, so they get fixed, closed and repeated. Here is a twenty minute version.
Shutdown and Turnaround Planning: What to Do Twelve Months Out
Turnarounds rarely fail during the turnaround. They fail months earlier, in a meeting where somebody said we will sort that out nearer the time.
Maintenance Backlog Management: How to Read Yours and What to Do About It
Four hundred open jobs could mean a healthy plant or one that has given up closing anything. The size tells you little. Sort by age and the picture changes completely.
Weekly Maintenance Scheduling Meeting: How to Run One That Is Worth the Time
This meeting exists to commit to a week and agree what gets dropped. Four questions get you there in thirty minutes. Everything else in the room is a different meeting wearing this one's clothes.
Maintenance Job Plans: How to Write One a Technician Will Be Glad to Get
Ask your crew what they do with your job plans. If they glance at the parts list and work out the rest themselves, the plans are written for the file rather than the person doing the job.
Maintenance Planning vs Scheduling: What Each Role Actually Does
Planning answers what and how. Scheduling answers when and who. When one person does both under pressure, scheduling always wins and the planning quietly disappears.
Maintenance Planner Productivity: What Fills the Week and How to Win Time Back
Six in ten maintenance leaders say their planners spend less than a third of their time planning. The rest goes somewhere specific, and most of it is fixable.
Reliability Programme Rollout: Why the First Six Months Feel Slower
Six months in, the team is working harder and the numbers look worse. Both are usually true, and neither means the programme is failing. Here is what is happening underneath.
Multi-Site Maintenance Standardisation: How to Do It Without Losing Local Knowledge
When five sites do the same job differently, some of that is drift and some of it is knowledge. From head office they look identical. Here is how to tell them apart before you standardise.
Operations and Maintenance: How to Agree a Shutdown Window Without a Fight
The shutdown argument is not really about the machine. It is about two teams being measured over different lengths of time. Here is how to give both of them something they can read.
Maintenance Improvement Programmes: How to Keep One Alive Past Month Four
Most improvement programmes do not fail. They go quiet around month four, when the effort is real and the results are not visible yet. Here is how to get a team across that gap.
Work order cycle time: how long a job really takes, from request to closed
A work order is raised on a Monday in July for a minor gearbox inspection. It sits in the planner's queue, then waits for a part, then waits for a scheduled slot, and finally gets done in December.
Wrench time: how much of the paid day actually reaches the tools
Follow a skilled technician through a normal shift. She clocks in, waits for her assignment, walks to the storeroom, finds the part was never staged, walks back for a permit, waits for the equipment to be locked out, and finally picks up a tool we...
Industry 4.0 Training Lifts Maintenance at Canadian Mining Company
Industry 4.0 training strengthened maintenance practices and asset management skills at a Canadian mining company, improving communication between technical teams and leadership for safer, more efficient operations.
Elevating Technical Expertise in an Automotive Manufacturer
A targeted training program boosted technician skills in maintenance and safety, improving uptime, morale, and operational efficiency. The approach led to better safety compliance, reduced turnover, and more reliable production.
Targeted Training Strengthens Safety at Uranium Producer
Targeted maintenance training at a uranium producer improved resource control and safety discipline, enabling smoother Industry 4.0 technology adoption and clearer operational planning.
