Machinery Lubrication

34 Reliable Plant | www . reliableplant.com Machinery Lubrication | www . machinerylubrication.com 2025 Annual KPIs To have a proactive maintenance program, we should aim for less than 20% of our work orders being reactive. While not foolproof, a great way to start estimating your level of reactive work orders is by measuring the hours you spend on them. For example, a ten-person workforce has 400 hours of labor available a week. If a team member charged 80 hours of work for emergency work orders, the plant would be operating with 20% of its work orders being reactive. Another way to calculate your facility's number of reactive work orders is to measure the number of emergency work orders against the number of total work orders. For instance, if you had 100 new work orders in a week and 20 of them were urgent, then your facility has a 20% emergency work order rate. e fewer emergency work orders, the better we are performing and preventing failures. Unfortunately, it's not abnormal for a facility to find their work orders are nearly 50% reactive. In this way, we are much like Snow White, sleeping and maintaining, not proactively responding to the needs of our critical assets. Happy: Work Orders Completed Per Month It's critical to reduce our facility's emergency work orders, but how do we accomplish this? First and foremost, we must perform proactive maintenance. But we must accomplish this while our hands are still full of reactive work. is can be difficult to achieve because plants have become experts in efficiently completing reactive work orders, which maintains profitability and doesn't require change. But management must understand that completing proactive work not only reduces reactive work, but significantly increases profitability. Did You Know? Facilities that switch from a reactive to proactive maintenance system can reduce their maintenance costs by up to 40%. Source: upkeep.com is is accomplished through planning and scheduling — the "productivity piece" of maintenance — which can increase work order completion by 50% without having to hire additional staff. And because the bulk of our work is normally reactive, this 50% boost creates more time for proactive projects, making management Happy (our first dwarf ). Consider Parkinson's Law — the amount of work assigned expands to fill the amount of time available. Reactive maintenance will expand to take control of the entire schedule, but with careful planning, we can manage this and place greater importance on proactive work. Doc: Weekly Schedule Coverage We can overcome Parkinson's Law not only with planning and scheduling but through the work orders' mission. For example, a ten-person crew working a 40-hour week will have 400 labor hours available. e planner's goal is to schedule 400 hours of work for the week. By changing the overall mission of the work orders from "take care of reactive operations and stay busy" to "this schedule is to help us be productive, not busy," the schedule doesn't have to have set completion days or assigned team members. rough careful planning and prioritizing, the schedule will naturally create a productive work environment that creates greater efficiency for the entire facility. Did You Know? "Schedule compliance is probably the most dangerous of all key performance indicators," and most plants use the metric so inaccurately that both productivity and reliability suffer. Source: plantservices.com Combining a filled schedule with this new mission moves our teams from being busy to being productive, helping us achieve the 50% productivity boost we're looking for. While simple in nature, this methodology is exactly what the Doc (our second dwarf ) prescribed. Dopey: Weekly Schedule Compliance A schedule's purpose is to help complete more work, not achieve a perfect schedule compliance score. We should aim for 40% to 90% schedule compliance, showing we fully accounted for the available labor while increasing the number of completed proactive work orders. is concept of not insisting on high schedule compliance scores requires management maturity. Insisting on a high score is Dopey (our third dwarf ) because it encourages planners to underload the schedule, thereby giving in to Parkinson's Law. Schedulers must also be mindful to not give credit to partially completed work. e work was either completed entirely or it wasn't. Evil Queen: Wrench Time Wrench time is the time a team member is actively working on completing a job. is doesn't include the time it takes to get extra parts or tools, travel from one location to another, or take a break. Surprisingly, many plants only experience a 35% wrench time rate, meaning only three and a half out of every ten hours are considered productive. While focusing on this KPI can increase productivity, there are downsides. First, wrench time doesn't reveal if the work is being completed correctly or efficiently. No matter how slowly a job is completed, if the work is continuous, the wrench time equals 100%. Second, performing research into why your wrench time is lower might be your Evil Queen — it can cause rumors and severe morale damage among team members. Instead, simply accept this as an opportunity to improve.

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