The 15-Minute Rule

Recently, I met with a maintenance group at a large university to discuss work order planning and scheduling. During the meeting, one of the maintenance people posed an interesting question: “We are a service industry, not a manufacturing facility. Is there a difference in how we should do things?”

That made me think about my previous columns in this magazine and how I am generally referring to the manufacturing or processing industries. This person’s question made me analyze the differences in operations such as universities and hospitals. When it comes to maintenance and how we perform it, what is the difference between doing maintenance in a service industry versus a manufacturing industry?

Here’s what I came up with. First, let’s look at what these organizations have in common and how they differ.

Universities and hospitals both have critical equipment that must be maintained, but so do factories. Of course, they both have equipment to repair and preventive maintenance to perform. Emergency calls and breakdowns certainly occur in both places and neither have more maintenance people then they require or more money in their budgets than they can spend. So where are the differences?

The biggest difference I see is the number of service calls. It is not uncommon for a university to receive 700 to 1,000 service calls per month. The calls come from students and faculty in residences, classrooms or event buildings. These calls concern anything from a leaky faucet to replacing a light bulb to repairing doors.

The maintenance calls pour in day after day and the customers expect a response. It’s a full-time job for someone to manage the service call desk. Requests come in by e-mail, website forms, telephone and written notes. Anyone working at a university, hospital or other service organization knows what I’m talking about.

Because of the number of service calls, it’s not uncommon for these maintenance departments to feel overwhelmed as they try their best to balance their time between emergencies, general service calls and preventive maintenance. The maintenance departments are customer-focused and must respond to the customer needs. Unlike manufacturing operations that may have planned shutdowns during the year, service facilities have very few breaks when the maintenance department can catch up. Even universities are busy in the summer months now.

PM suffers

Looking at the all the maintenance that must be done, the activity that usually suffers the most in the service industry is preventive maintenance (PM).

It’s a daily battle for service organizations to get things done, just as it is in the manufacturing sector. Both types of operation have a limited number of craft hours and resources available and they must decide how to get their work completed. However, at the universities and hospitals we work with, we take a slightly different approach to the daily workload. Here’s what we try to do:

Step 1: Work requests. Work requests are reviewed several times daily. So many requests are submitted that they add up quickly. If they are not reviewed right away, it doesn’t take long before they are six months old or older. It’s not uncommon to see two-year-old work orders in a CMMS (computerized maintenance management system).

Most of the service requests are superficial, such as asking to build a shelf, move an electrical plug, etc. As time goes by, many of these request are no longer needed. They are forgotten about and many become invalid. If a service request is two years old, how important is it anyway?

A thorough review and clean-up of these small jobs in the CMMS needs to be done. The ones left should be manageable.

Step 2: Review and validate the PM program. First we need to make sure every PM is still required. Perhaps the HVAC systems have been contracted out and in-house PMs are no longer needed. Recently we found a furnace PM still being printed out every three months, when in fact the furnace maintenance had been contracted out two years previous. A thorough update needs to be performed on all CMMS preventive maintenance procedures and schedules.

Step 3: What PMs really need to be done? With any service organization, time is the deciding factor. Getting PMs done at all is often difficult or impossible. So after we take care of Step 2, we must look at what really needs to get done. We’ll examine the most critical needs. What buildings, equipment or specific locations must have the PMs completed? Once this is determined, a method needs to be developed where these PMs are done quickly and effectively.

To do this, a method we commonly employ is the 15-Minute Rule.

First we develop an inspection checklist for a group of equipment, systems or buildings. Then the frequency of the PM required must be decided and added to the checklist.

Using the 15-Minute Rule, the maintenance person goes to the worksite and moves through this checklist, inspecting all the points. If something is found that needs attention, the craftsperson will ask some quick questions. Is this problem critical? Can it be fixed in 15 minutes? If both answers are yes, then the repair is done on the spot.

If one answer is no, then the problem is noted and a work order is created back at the shop. Then the craftsperson moves on to the next location and goes over the checklist again.

Using this method, the PMs will be completed. Without the 15-Minute Rule, the maintenance department becomes paralyzed by fixing every problem found and the PM work order takes forever to do or is never completed.

Step 4: Examine the criticality of the equipment and buildings. The importance and priority of each building and piece of equipment should be reflected in the way the service calls are prioritized each day. This helps the maintenance department stratify the daily work order load by focusing on the highest priority work orders.

Your CMMS should be able to calculate a work priority for every work order that is created in the system. The CMMS will sort the work orders automatically and the maintenance department can use this as a tool to handle the highest-priority calls and provide better service to its customers.

Occasionally, the work order priority list can go to the dogs, just as it can in manufacturing. Special events and emergencies can come out of the blue and must be dealt with immediately. However, once things are back under control, then it’s time to get back to the priority list.

We now see that there are some big differences between the service industry and manufacturing and I’m sure I may have missed some. In both cases the work stills needs to be done using the available labour hours. Devising ways to complete the important stuff and keep the customers happy often takes thinking outside the box. What works in manufacturing may not work in the service industry.

Deciding how work gets done can make the difference of whether you sink or swim in the work order pool.

Peter Phillips of Trailwalk Holdings, a CMMS consulting and training company based in Nova Scotia, can be reached at 902-798-3601 or by e-mail at peter@trailwalk.ca. Previous columns can be viewed at www.mromagazine.com.