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