ANALYSIS
Key Performance Indicators as Applied to a School-Bus Maintenance Process
WRITTEN BY ROBERT T. PUDLEWSKI, STN TECHNICAL EDITOR
measured — in other words, “you are what you measure.” While it may be possible to create a key performance indicator
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or metric for any particular maintenance function, it is not always practical. You must balance the effort involved and the cost of collecting the data with its actual or potential value. For example, you may consider that it would be useful to develop a metric that indicates the number of work orders completed against the number issued. Poor performance on this metric would indicate a reduction
in commitment on behalf of the technicians to input data to the vehicle maintenance recording system (VMRS). For this metric to be useful, however, would entail a very significant amount of work in scanning the VMRS for each work order, which was not completed and then trying to determine to whom it was issued, etc. Effective KPIs can be a valuable tool for triggering corrective maintenance actions. However, maintenance metrics are worthless if they do not provide worthwhile indications of maintenance performance, particularly when this performance is below acceptable levels. Te key to this is that a KPI should normally have a trigger level set on it that is used to initiate some corrective maintenance action. If no trigger has been set then your maintenance metric is ineffective. If no one has defined the level on the metric where performance becomes bad enough to require corrective action, then there is no point in recording it. School bus technicians and first-line supervisors should be heavily
involved in setting the targets for KPIs since they are usually most closely tied to the work environment and fleet characteristics to accurately decide the acceptable performance targets, and because management-only driven schemes often fail to work in the long term.
TYPICAL MAINTENANCE KPIS
• PM (various) schedule and compliance to intervals • Time taken to answer maintenance calls •
Budget compliance
• Work order man-hours • Overtime worked against plan •
• Number of breakdowns (unplanned maintenance) • •
Equipment performance (with respect to quality)
• A realistic period must also be used for each metric. In some cases this may be one day while in others it could be one year.
50 School Transportation News August 2013
Critical equipment availability (in-service vs. out of service) Equipment category performance (tire, engine, brake life, etc.)
hen built into school-bus maintenance management processes, key performance indicators, or KPIs, become a system, which will change behavior so it complies with what is
MEASURE WHAT MAINTENANCE IS DOING WITH ITS TIME AND RESOURCES
Useful KPIs are those that identify where maintenance allocates their time, people and money each month. If the maintenance department has no focus on delivering business objectives then it ends up doing anything and everything to keep the operation running. Over decades of work we have come to understand that a successful school-bus maintenance program is not about fixing things; it is about not having to fix things. When done well an effective preventive maintenance process guided by meaningful KPIs delivers reliability and lower risks that save fortunes of expenditure year-after-year. Te secret is not to focus on doing reactive maintenance; rather
focus on creating KPIs to deliver reliability and remove operating risk (or creating safety). Te maintenance department has the duty to stop problems from starting, and where there are problems, they are responsible to remove them so that reliability and risk reduction are produced. You only need to measure how much effort is being made in your school district or company today to improve it and make it a better
School District or Company Goals
Transportation OPS Site Goals
Individual and Maint. Department Goals
• Safety & Complience • Return on Investment • Tax Payer Value • Shareholder Value
• Safety • Vehicle Availability • OPS Performance • Budget Performance
• Safety
• Operating Efficiency • Equipment Reliability
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