Maintenance: Selling Your Accomplishments to Top Management

By Michael Cowley

January 2011

Now that you see the need to market maintenance performance, consider some of your department's specific accomplishments — including positive feedback from customers — you can sell to top management:

• Customer satisfaction. Respond to every completed work order with a customer-satisfaction survey. Allow ratings on a scale of 1-5, and ask for comments.
• Reactive versus proactive work. How much time do technicians spend on reactive work? How much time do they spend on proactive work? The more proactive work, the better.
• Life-cycle costs. What is the total cost to maintain an asset, including labor, parts, and contractor costs? How does that figure compare to similar equipment or comparable facilities?
• Energy savings. What energy savings has maintenance created due to better purchasing, preventive work, redesigns, etc.?
• Preventive or predictive maintenance savings. Compare the cost of catastrophic failures to the savings from preventive or predictive maintenance.
• Uptime or downtime of critical equipment. What is the cost to the organization if a critical asset or system is down for an hour? Measure improvements over time.
• Response times. How long did it take for a technician to show up to work on a reported problem? The ultimate goal is to eliminate most reactive calls so response time becomes less important.
• Reducing the maintenance backlog. If it is more than 8-10 weeks, you have dissatisfied customers.
• Work-schedule compliance. Do technicians complete the tasks they promise the customer? Divide jobs completed by jobs promised.
• Cost to maintain assets by department or area. Compare the cost to maintain assets to other similar assets, such as other facilities, operations, or plants.
• Cost to maintain by square foot. What is the total cost per square foot to maintain a facility? How does this figure compare to industry standards? How does it compare to other facilities in your company?

But be careful not to use too many examples or make them so complex no one can understand them.