Wrong Maintenance Strategy Can Lead to Fraud!

This blog was inspired by recent events at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA):
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/04/mbta_fires_empl.html

The MBTA fired 3 superintendents today for manipulating the mileage records in order to avoid regular maintenance activities on over 200 of the 1,050 buses they operate.

The reason they focused on the mileage records was that this was the trigger to do a more thorough inspection of each bus at the depot every 6,000 miles. This is a signal of a possible poorly developed maintenance strategy for bus inspections. One could even argue that the 3 of 9 depot stations where this fraud occured, realized it was the incorrect maintenance strategy, but instead of fixing it to improve operations, they worked around it in a dangerous way.

Identifying and remedying poor maintenance strategies is the basis of good maintenance best practices, like you see with such emerging standards as PAS 55. Along with this you need to reduce paper based processes, in this case with inspections, by adding a strong mobile capability that collects the right types of data to analyze.

Sure hind sight is 20/20, but if the MBTA had a culture of evaluating if the data they were collecting was the right data to analyze, they would have had a process and reports that might have showed that inspecting buses every 6,000 miles does not lead to any fixes, but if we slowing evaluated moving out the inspection every 1,000 miles or so on a subset of the bus fleet, to where they start to see issues and maintenance required, the inspection process then creates value. Oh, and guess what...you just reduced inspection costs by 50% if the inspections moved to 12,000 miles.

One more thing, it is clear the MBTA needs to re-evaluate how they do maintenance. What happened at the 3 depots is a message to the other 6 depots that there are areas for improvement in efficiencies (how the collect data), maintenance strategies (what is the right data to collect), analyzation (evaluating the data) to make the correct maintenance decisions.

Although you cannot be fired for following the processes in place, a culture should be established that making efficiency changes that reduce the cost of maintenance and increase wrench time are rewarded.

Mincom
Experience Asset Intensity

In Pursuit of Happiness in Safe & Reliable Operations

Its in our DNA, its part of our culture, we don't move forward with a new project until we know the safety ramifications. Global Asset Intensive organizations run safe and reliable operations, the must as its usually mentioned in the first sentence in their "About" section.

But seriously, they do, these operations are tough, dangerous and yield high rewards. Asset Intensive industries do not need bad press, when things go bad in industries like Mining, Oil & Gas or Utilties, people die, environments get damaged, homes and business explode! Yes, there is a such thing as bad press.

The problem is these organizations are in business where they cannot win at the safety and reliability game, there are always lapses in judgement and just plain old accidents. How can a Oil Vessel think it can have route over the most globally prestine and protected marine environments in the world? Why can 100 miners be trapped for a week in a collapsed mine by eating nothing but tree bark and sawdust?

Worse yet it trying to navigate a framework of compliance that each country institutes with environmental, health and safety regulations. Further, is having within a certian country, regulations that seem to have no standard or consistency, because you can just through people at the problem. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal describes this very problem: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703502804575101500778067986.html

So what is there to do? This is usually the point where I believe appropriate technology and business processes can solve the problem, and it can, to some degree, but not when inspectors vary on the regulations. Its hard to show compliance of something that changes based on the inspector your talking too.

But I digress, what you really want is to be sure you are continually improving your operations and processes. Call it operational excellence, six sigma, you name it yourself, but understanding the why, and collecting the right information and analyzing it is the only way to lead to step change improvements in an organization. This has proven to lead to reduced accidents, better compliance and profitability.

www.mincom.com
Experience Asset Intensity