Working from home? Ideas for leveraging this time.

With many people at home either due to the closure of their operations, self-isolation protocols, or as a proactive measure to reduce non-essential staff on site, some might question how these individuals can be productive, particularly when assets are not operating. However, if employees have access to their CMMS/EAM/ERP data systems from home, here are some value-added activities that employees and employers should consider undertaking given the time they now have. Note these are in no particular order as priorities would be context-specific, and specific procedures are omitted for this same reason.

1. Review Historical Maintenance Costs. Look for bad actor assets by looking at work order costs over the last 12 - 36 months and developing Pareto charts. Refine the charts by segregating preventive maintenance costs from corrective maintenance costs. Consider analyzing by asset class as well. Using Excel pivot tables is a great way analyse data in many ways with minimal effort.
2. Review of PM Program Effectiveness. Are you getting value from your PMs? Look at your where preventive maintenance orders for each asset or asset class against your corrective and emergency orders. If there are too many failures still occurring despite a lot of preventive work, you have being doing the wrong PM or inducing failure by doing the PMs. Similarly, if you do a lot of PM inspections for an asset or asset class and never find any problems that the inspections are meant to uncover, perhaps you can reduce your frequency. If you still experience failures despite never detecting anything on your PM inspections - you’re clearly not inspecting the right things.
3. Update Bills of Materials. Are your asset bill of materials (spare parts lists) up to date? Now’s a great time to catch up on these so that future planning efforts are more efficient.
4. Create Material Catalog Entries (Material Masters /SKUs). Many organisation find it difficult to find the time to create new entries for their material catalogue. This is one reason why Bills of Materials cannot be fully created.
5. Update Job Plans and Procedure. Do you have pre-planned job plans and procedures for all your regular maintenance activities, be they preventive or corrective? Are your job plans and procedures as detailed and clear as they could be?

Finally, regardless of whether employees have access to their asset data systems, they can Learn & Train. When plants are operating, many employees and employers find it difficult to justify time for learning. With the advancement of on-line collaboration and learning tools, now is great time to learn everything and anything about how to use your ERP/EAM/CMMS data systems (e.g. SAP-PM, Maximo, etc.), how to better use office systems (SharePoint, Excel - Pivot Tables for one..., Power BI, etc.), as well as taking on-line courses in maintenance management, reliability engineering, asset management, finance, etc.   

What are your COVID-19 related challenges and responses?

Join the discussion on our LinkedIn group. This specific discussion post is here.

PEMAC Members can now participate in the PEMAC Discussion Forum. This specific question has been posted here.