How much is PM Creep costing your Business?

When you operate in a highly competitive, constantly changing environment with limited resources, the value proposition of your PM tasks’ value proposition is critical to the business performance of any enterprise.

According to Forbes magazine, “One out of every three dollars spent on preventive maintenance is wasted.” Unfortunately, PM Creep is but one contributor to such waste.

The good news is that PM Creep can be reversed to unlock significant and measurable gains.

Typical symptoms of PM creep can include:

– Inspections not driving commensurate levels of corrective activities.

– Unplanned work trending up due to missed PM work

– Increasing number of PM tasks generated

– Your forward log of work (work on the horizon) is growing, but the assets haven’t changed.

– Duplication in PM tasks generated

PM Creep’s single most significant driver is the failure to routinely stop and review your PM strategy to understand if it is continuing to be effective and delivering optimal value for money.

This process can be likened to the Plan-Do-Check-Act mantra of Continuous Improvement.

Contributing factors can include:

– Duplication or overlap of PM activities.

– Generating new PM activities in response to high profile failures (knee-jerk reactions).

– Adopting a “Set and Forget” approach to PM.

– PM strategy not changing with the plant, process, business plan and customer needs.

One challenge that organisations face is awareness. That is, they are not attuned to the symptoms nor the effects of PM Creep. However, once the gap and potential gains are identified, this can develop a case for change.

Another and by far the most common challenge is where companies have an awareness of the problem but lack the time, resources, tools or techniques to optimise their PM strategy, despite their best efforts.

You can even find yourself in a position whereby you evolve to become quite proficient in running with a PM strategy that, when examined closely, may not be adding any value in certain areas.

One option is to do nothing! So the only question here is, have your competitors made the same choice?

The other is to embark on a process to closely examine your current PM work to assess how effective it is and where it measures up in terms of value add.

Such a review process should consider the following factors:

– What is the underlying strategic objective of the proposed PM activity?

– Frequency of tasks, too often, will consume resources, heighten the risk of maintenance induced failures and make changes harder to spot. If you have struggled to keep up with monthlies for some time and end up happening every second or third month, the chances are that interval could work out. Conversely, too infrequent increases the risk of not detecting a potential failure and losing the “pulse” of your plant.

– Precisely what are you asking to be done? Does it simply state “inspect widget” and leave the quality of the activity and data gathered up to the technician’s discretion? It needs to be prescriptive. Do your check sheets specify control limits to give meaning to measurements and other data acquired during inspections? What else can I incorporate at this location to maximise the value of a person being there?

That said, to complete such a process is a significant undertaking that will require a commitment of time and resources. The sad reality is that most asset managers don’t have the bandwidth to support such a process, despite knowing how much value it could/will unlock.

The experienced team at EnterpriseIS have a proven track record of helping clients with their PM needs, irrespective of where they are on their journey to reach their goals. Reach out to the team at EnterpriseIS if you need some help with your PM strategies. We can tailor a solution to help you unlock the hidden value that exists in your business, reach your goals, and discover the possibilities.