I am going to be using this space to document our transition and implementation to SAP. I will share what I can and provide as much info for people reading and also for your comments. To say I have been thrown in at the deep end would be about right but it is all good. I am lucky to be able to have this experience on my CV. The story so far; we are part of a multinational company that has SAP on their sites in the US and are now rolling it out to UK sites. The project stared in the middle of this month and is expected to wrap up around October. Our site has a couple of challenges, very little CMMS, outdated inventory and no site designated planner. However, the need for one has been recognised as vital and is expected over the next couple of months. My role presently is as an engineering manager, I am heading up this SAP project on our site and have begun to populate the master data file. This coming week we have set about employing a resource to begin to put every item in the engineering stores onto an excel sheet for the load. it is my responisibility to generate the workcenters, locations and equipment lists for the masterdata. We have a few weeks to get this compiled which is no mean feat when no legacy system exists.  I have a question on functional locations, is it better to be broad and abstract, and have fewer locations. Or be more specefic and have more locations? My thinking is too many locations will prove difficult to maintain, but then too few may make searching difficut? Having not used SAP before in any real capacity it would be good to get some thoughts.              

Hi everyone, Peter Drucker, an Austrian management consultant, educator and author, who is also known as the founder of modern management, has a quote that says: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” In short, this is because if you cannot measure something, and know the results, you can’t possibly get better at it. For this reason, this week we will be discussing about something that plays a pivotal role by showing you and your team if you are on the right track on the road to reliability: Key Performance Indicators Also known as KPI’s, key performance indicators, as its own name says, are metrics that a team measures the performance of a specific area or process by helping us to make the right decisions to correct or to make improvements. However, it is important to mention that not choosing the right KPI’s or tracking them incorrectly, might be worse than not tracking any metrics at all. For instance, imagine yourself heading to North with your family and your GPS pointing you at the wrong direction. I can tell that your trip would take a bit longer in the best-case scenario. Having said that, which KPI’s should you track? To be honest, this answer varies from industry to industry, as well as how advanced your processes are. See below some metrics that should be a good option if you want to start measuring the performance of your maintenance department:     Now it is your turn! Have you used this KPI’s before? Which KPI’s do you track? Would you add any other KPI's to this list?   Finally, I would like to say thanks to @Jim Vantyghem. He is a great enthusiast of this topic, as well as really knowledgeable and has been discussing it with us lately. Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with our community!   Regards, Raul Martins

Hi @Jim Vantyghem, I absolutely agree with your thoughts and that's why I mentioned the PCT in my response on May 12. The Prosci's Project Change Triangle (PCT) is about the three necessary constituents of any change project - Sponsorship/Leadership, Project Management and Change Management. While PM is mostly about technical aspect of the project, CM is all about people as human beings and their needs which have to be met should we want the change to succeed. And the reason Prosci has introduced so called ADKAR (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement) elements, is exactly related with teh need for change at individual level, when an organizational change is to be achieved. In my understanding, the sponsorship has been more exposed in the latest few messages just because we wanted to point out that is but a must, yet often missed. As mentioned, it is one of the three PCT elements and if any of them is missing, the chances for the change to be successful are very slim. I am not trying to advocate Prosci's methodology as the only viable one - there are several others out there (John Kotter's is also very well known and widely used). I like ti as it is very well structured, based on 20 year+ research worldwide and I have personally positive experience with in practice. You may want to visit https://www.prosci.com/, where wealth of useful information, articles, webinars and even on-line trainings can be found.   Best regards, Andrej

The connection could be either with engineers from the maintenance team or with OEM (if there is a technical support contract )

I would definitely agree with Erik that this is a topic worthy of more discussion. In the early 90s, as a maintenance manager, I had noticed the trend of so called repairs being associated to equipment setup or human errors. In this particular facility, it was the responsibility for the operators to setup equipment. The maintenance staff had been frustrated by this situations and thus, we set in place the following plan. 1. Using the functionality of the PM work order generation application, we had created blanket work orders with a change to the WO type code so as to read SETUP instead of PM. 2. The blanket work orders were created and set to generate utilizing  a PM fixed rule of monthly (1st day of the month) only for those pieces of equipment that required a production run setup or required adjustments. 3. The work orders were not printed upon generation but instead a custom report had been created, filtered by work order type SETUP and via a date range, which listed all the equipment or Asset #, name and blanket work order number. The information was sorted by department and one page of the report held approximately 25 - 30 lines of equipment / SETUP blanket work order numbers. 4. Each maintenance person had been given this report  at the beginning of each month. The SETUP blanket work orders from the previous month were closed and coded as completed. 5. If a maintenance person was faced with a process or equipment setup issue, they would log their labor hours against the blanket work order in the CMMS software, along with indicating the operators name and a bullet point mention of what had to be adjusted in the comment section. NOTE: I have and continue to advocate that reporting with a dollar value as a much more impact towards getting someone's attention. With this said, the total cost for the year for the SETUP issues equated to $28,000 CAD. Now, back in the early 90s this equates to a lot of money spend on non value added maintenance activities. In addition, imagine the impact on lost throughput, lack of time to complete PM inspections, repairs, projects etc. I would hazard to guess that the value of $28K could easily have been increased by a factor of 10+. Now imagine if we would have captured the other categorized human error based issues. Following this, I had conducted a social experiment at this time as well as related to a SEE, HEAR, and TOUCH approach training program for production operators geared towards congruent and consistent equipment setups.  As a result, a significant reduction in setup times, increased throughput and yields, and a noticeable change in work force attitude in the particular process line that the training had taken place. Lastly, there were 3 shifts working on this particular center and one shift appeared to be lagging behind the other two. In short, it was noticed that the operator of this shift lacked mechanical aptitude skills. Thus a decision was made to move this person to another position in the plant ( Another seat on the bus). Also, capturing maintenance labor time, operator names and general setup issues resolved can be data used to help with performance reviews, training efficiencies, and a host of other valuable information. The long winded point to my aforementioned story is that human error happens more frequently than we know, but we also have the ability to do something about this. Sometimes we have to fix the person first! Cheers, Jim