Last week was the first of our new category of blogs, Operational Excellence, the second tier of Integrated Asset Management.  To continue within the category, I wanted to turn our attention to the two most common hurdles I see facility and asset managers struggle with as it relates to Preventative Maintenance (PM):  an accurate, up-to-date equipment inventory and a comprehensive list of PM tasks that could (should) be performed on your equipment.

Obviously, there is an order to clearing these hurdles because even if you had a comprehensive PM task list, if you don’t know exactly what equipment you have and where it is, the tasks have much lower value than when combined with a detailed inventory.  So, we are going to start with the challenge of gathering and maintaining an accurate equipment inventory.

In my experience, the first inclination for most organizations is to focus on using internal staff to gather equipment inventory data.  This logically makes sense, since your staff are the ones who are “on the tools” working with the equipment on a daily basis.  It only makes sense that while they are on-site to fix or maintain a piece of equipment, they gather the appropriate information on it (Make, Model, Serial #, etc.). 

Although it does appear logical, there are a few significant issues that typically get in the way of making this approach successful.

First, is the time that it typically takes for an internal team to complete the inventory exercise.  When the focus is on gathering the information only when you are already on-site, it will take a long time to get around to see every piece of equipment in a portfolio of any size. 

Additionally, if you are not doing a lot of PMs then most of your time is going to be spent on equipment that have issues or fails.  As a result, it can take quite a while to inventory your newer, or better functioning equipment.  Unfortunately, those are the pieces of equipment that can most often  benefit from PMs.  If equipment is in poor condition or has a high rate of failure, you are more likely better off replacing it than focusing limited staff resources on PMs.

The second issue that arises when you have many people across an O&M team doing the inventory, is consistency.  In the absence of a detailed training program (and even in some cases despite it), if you have multiple staff collecting inventory information for you, there can be a lot of inconsistency creep into the process and the data.  Whether it be where you apply the tags, what Uniformat II code is applied, how they record the data or the level of diligence that they bring to try to gather the nameplate and other data, the more people that you have doing something the more opportunity for error. 

This is exacerbated by Hurdle #1, because, since it is often a multiyear process, even more staff are plugged in to the program due to staff turnover and changes.

Most organizations that are using internal staff to gather data, do not do any Quality Control on the data collected, they just use it as-is when gathered from the field.  As is always the case, the best system built on bad data is always going to be a bad system.

I originally intended this to be a stand-alone post.  However, the more I dove in, the more and more that I wanted to say.  As a result, I am going to stop here for this week and continue on next week with a Part 2. See you next week!