Case Study for Maintenance Strategy Development

This project assisted an NHS Trust Hospital to create a maintenance strategy document detailing policy and procedures which made provision for the implementation of an integrated and modernized computerized maintenance management system (EAM/CMMS).

The NHS Trust had recognized the importance of developing a maintenance strategy as a prerequisite to implementing a EAM/CMMS or indeed any modular element of such a system. Therefore Strategic Maintenance Planning proposed to develop following the maintenance audit and strategy development the specific implementation plans for The Hospital to achieve best maintenance practice.

A Maintenance Strategy brought all current maintenance practices and operations together with current best practice in order to provide a strategic and coherent 'road map' for engineering to follow in order to achieve the following goals:

• Improve service provision to the customer i.e. reduce breakdowns and improve uptime
• Control engineering spending and ensure adherence to budgets
• Consistently provide parts for planned maintenance and breakdowns with the lowest spares holding value
• Improve communication between engineering and other functional departments
• Ensure engineering compliance to all local and OHSA statutory requirements
• To ensure engineering is focused on the Trusts objectives
• Enable engineering to take a lead in the Trusts strategy development

The Maintenance Strategy was developed by the following process.

Completion of a Maintenance Audit

The maintenance audit is a review of the maintenance function from within the Hospital taking into account all the various functional departments. The purpose of a Maintenance Audit is to derive a maintenance strategy, which aims to deliver improvements to the general maintenance function, provide clearer communications and to develop a set of Best Practices for the maintenance function.

The Audit provided The Hospital with a baseline of performance measures and critical observations after which the organization could continue to effect change.

This work was accomplished through the completion of interviews with a wide cross-section of personnel from all functions. Questions were based around the following subjects:

• Organization and departmental growth and change
• Organization information knowledge including budget control procedures
• Departmental strategy and development
• Departmental interactions
• Staff morale and willingness to change
• Performance measurement
• Maintenance processes and methodologies
• Stores Inventory Control including purchasing
• Project Management control
• Future direction

Writing a Maintenance Audit review document

The maintenance audit has been designed to determine thoughts of individuals and groups and ensure the following objectives are reached: 

• A snapshot of the current engineering function, allowing the current situation to be benchmarked
• An accurate assessment of other functional perceptions of engineering performance
• To identify areas of functional weakness to allow improvement strategies to be planned and executed
• To provide a ground work of information for the development of a Maintenance Strategy

All information from the maintenance audit was organized into a document that provided a distillation of the perceptions and thoughts of the respondents. From this general themes were uncovered, and areas that require addressing through the Maintenance Strategy identified.

Completion of a benchmarking exercise

In order to provide a wider perspective to the results of the Engineering Review Document and to provide additional groundwork for the development of the Maintenance Strategy a bench-marking exercise was carried out.

To complete this exercise, critical "Hard" (systems and processes) and "Soft" (human resources and organization structure) issues within the engineering function were rated and tabled against Strategic Maintenance Planning experience in wider industry. These tabulations were then shown in radar graph format to show how The Hospital engineering function compares with engineering functions in wider industry.

Development of a Maintenance Strategy

A Maintenance Strategy was developed for the Hospital Trust's engineering function which delivered the following benefits:

• A Maintenance Strategy integrates with and facilitates The Trusts Business Plans and goals
• Established current best practice, providing a basis for development to working methods
• The Maintenance Strategy will dictate direction
• Developed an Engineering Charter to set service levels for operations
• Appropriate Maintenance Methods were identified for each asset
• Engineering Resource Organization reflects the needs of the business
• Justification for an appropriate level of Human Resource
• Use of Best Industry Practice
• Project Engineering could adopt a life cycle asset management approach
• Compliance with all company systems and standards
• Auditing of performance against a formal strategic framework
• Implementation of a structured program of Continuous Improvement

Finally, the key elements of the Maintenance Strategy were distilled into a prioritized plan for implementation.

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