COVER STORY Are Your Technicians PRODUCTIVE? By Joel Levitt, Director of Projects, Reliability Leadership Institute, Reliabilityweb.com & David A. Kolman, Editor How do you know? 10 Fleet Maintenance | APRIL 2017 ne way to measure maintenance and evaluate productivity is to determine the amount of useful work produced per hour of input. Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? In the fi eld of maintenance, however, this is more complex than in most other fi elds. If a technician is working effi ciently, accurately and professionally to remove and replace a component on unit 34, we would say he/she is productive. Th e technician might have three hours of total input – including travel, parts pick-up and the work itself, and with that managers might feel satisfi ed. But suppose the technician was given the wrong unit number: 43 instead or 34. How does that aff ect his/her productivity? Another technician is working on the right unit with the right materials, but is doing a repair which will fail within two years rather than lasting 10 years. Th is technician planned better and works faster, doing the work in an hour instead of the allotted two. Is he/she productive? Suppose the repair lasted fi ve years? Th ese are tough questions, and they have no easy answers. Company Culture Counts Our organization’s systems and benefi ts, along with the human resource and safety departments, all impose non-productive time on technicians, though some is necessary. Within the same organization, two maintenance departments across town from one another could each have very diff erent initial productivity levels based on system-imposed activities – meetings, availability O SHOP OPERATIONS
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