Effective Performance Management

Welcome to part six of my 10-part series of blogs called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance. To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital intensive industry.

Uptime Insights Part Six:

Achieving Cost Effectiveness with Performance Management

The work management process is essential to keeping costs under control in maintenance but how will you know if you are doing well if you don’t measure what you are doing and the results you get? Performance management is another essential for maintenance management. Costs are important, results are important and so are the processes you use to turn costs into results. Performance management is central to managing those processes so you get the most output for the least input – the greatest cost effectiveness.

Being effective in managing maintenance performance entails management of a number of measures that tell you about the work management process, materials management, training of your tradesmen, reliability improvement efforts and so on. What you measure, how and how often you measure are all important elements.

Benchmarking has its place in helping you set realistic and achievable performance targets but more importantly it can help you see what other companies have done to achieve higher levels of performance. A number of widely used benchmark standards are available for use if all you want are hard targets. Benchmarking visits and real learning will help you see ways to improve so you can meet those targets.

Balanced score cards provide an approach to tracking performance measures so that you achieve a balance between competing priorities. Trade-offs are bound to be needed like the trade-off between inventory cost reduction and maintenance service levels. By watching a balanced set of measures that considers the uptime outputs as well you are more able to make informed decisions that optimize performance in all areas to achieve the desired business output.

In our next blog we’ll explore part seven of our 10 part series “Uptime Insights: Support Systems Improve Efficiency.”

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