It is important to monitor progress, and how a fleet handles their maintenance is no exception. To measure how well your fleet is doing at completing maintenance accurately and efficiently, consider the Maintenance Maturity scale.
The Maintenance Maturity scale is based on a stable manufacturing model developed by Winston Ledet. Ledet is also known as the founder of the Manufacturing Game, an employee workshop model that focuses on developing a reliability culture to increase equipment reliability and operations.
Levels of maturity
The most common maturity level for all equipment is called reactive. You react to what the unit does (or more properly, what it does not do). Many consumers measure as “reactive” on the maintenance maturity scale when it comes to their personal vehicles. In general, the public take their vehicle into the shop when something is wrong. This is especially after the warranty service requirements have ended. In most states, statutory inspections – such as mandatory annual emissions testing – are the only time the vehicle is seen by a professional.
There is a subset of reactive called regressive. Regressive is where the customer or shop is reactive but will not, or cannot, spend the money to make the necessary repairs. The units get worse and worse. From a fleet perspective, this is typical when the business is having cash flow problems or is going out of business.
The most common maturity level in the fleet world is called preventative maintenance (PM) and planned maintenance. The unit is brought in periodically on a regular schedule to be inspected, lubricated, cleaned and adjusted for optimal use. This is pretty common, people are pretty good at it and it works reasonably well.
Technology has been progressing to the next maturity level to become more common. The maturity relies on technology to monitor the equipment and report out any readings that are not good. The machine monitors itself and reports on its condition. Certainly, all the major OEMs have dedicated time and resources to make this happen. This type of technology allows for predictive maintenance, where a fleet can use data to predict and prevent issues before they occur.
The next level
The problem with both preventative maintenance and predictive maintenance is that it doesn’t always stick. If you take your eye off the trucks and they slip through without service, or the fleet ignores the indicators, you fall right back into the reactive maturity level.
With that, it’s important to stay vigilant, utilize all available systems and programs and have employees who care to avoid the fall back to reactive maintenance.
There is a next-generation of maintenance maturity called precision maintenance. You may be doing some of this already. Precision maintenance is where you operate, fuel, service and repair an asset with precise specifications. Examples include:
- Precision assembly
- Precision bolting
- Precision spares (OEM or better)
- Precision lubrication
- Precision cleaning
- Precision installation
- Precision alignment
- Precision balancing
- Precision housekeeping during repair
- Precision operation
When you use precision techniques, you take better advantage of the OEM engineering because you repair and reassemble to the manufacturer’s specifications (torque, materials, order, techniques). Because of this, the maintenance is likely to have a longer lasting impact. Precision is a stable maturity. Once you set it up it should be sustaining, since most of the effort is in the front-end of the program during setup.
Precision applies to how the unit is operated, fueled and repaired. It reinforces appropriate care.
Share your knowledge
While technology is helpful and useful, focusing on it will hold you at the predictive domain and will stymie progress.
The importance of this knowledge is that the focus of your effort should be toward the next stable level on the scale. The only way to make change that sticks is to pass through preventative maintenance and predictive maintenance, to get yourself to precision. That’s not to say you should give up on preventative or predictive maintenance, just keep pushing until you are operating on a precision basis.
Employees who have served in the military, or have worked previously at large fleet operations such as UPS, have already been exposed to precision maintenance. Our industry needs to hear about those experiences; please get out there and tell your stories, so the rest of us can catch up.
Joel Levitt has trained more than 17,000 maintenance leaders from more than 3,000 organizations in 24 countries. He is the president of Springfield Resources, a management consulting firm that services a variety of clients on a wide range of maintenance issues (maintenancetraining.com). He is also the designer of Laser-Focused Training, a flexible training program that provides specific targeted training on your schedule, online to one to 250 people in maintenance management, asset management and reliability.
