By Leif Eric Petterson
Norse Systems Inc.

Equipment maintenance is one of the largest expense categories for most bus companies.

Often, maintenance cost is behind only payroll and fuel. Yet, it is an area of operations that continues to lag behind in terms of management sophistication.

There is a perception that maintenance is a commonsense activity best left to the mechanic's seat-of-the-pants judgment. This notion may result from a lack of in-shop experience on the part of today's professional manager. Many managers are more comfortable with a sales report or financial statement than they are with a socket set.

The truth, however, is that modern maintenance management presents a mix of management challenges that requires more than a good mechanical aptitude to produce optimum results.

In addition to a degree of comfort with the complex technology of modern equipment, and a good mechanical aptitude, the modern maintenance manager must cope with managing inventory investment levels, recruiting and training scarce skilled staff, warranty tracking and recovery, detailed record keeping while reducing equipment down time, and preserving the company's capital investment.

Despite this daunting mix of problems, maintenance management remains one of the best opportunities to reduce costs and improve financial performance.

There are four things required to manage maintenance effectively.

First, you must formulate a preventative maintenance plan at a level of detail that is workable and makes operational sense.

Second, you must insure that your shop works this plan accurately and in a timely fashion.

Third, you must be able to determine the precise cost of this maintenance plan and its impact on your resources.

Fourth, you must adjust the plan to improve its effectiveness.

The four requirements sound simple, but most maintenance activities do not have the system/information tools they need to make this management-cycle work.

Most managers have a plan (based on best guess), but they do not have a management tool to allow them to be sure they are triggering work in the shop that precisely reflects their plan.

Few shops collect the right information to allow them to make informed decisions about the maintenance plan and subsequently make adjustments.
How long has your maintenance plan been in effect -- 10 years, 20 years? When was the last time your shop did a maintenance plan review and adjusted the detail maintenance plan? What information did you use to back up your decisions?

It is my opinion that it is not possible to adequately manage a maintenance activity for more than 15 to 20 buses without a sophisticated "before-the-fact," automated maintenance management system like CEMP1 from Norse Systems.

A before-the-fact maintenance system is one that issues repair orders for the mechanics to start work on a predefined set of tasks before any work is performed. The maintenance system is the work trigger.

Work is triggered based on equipment activity, collected daily, such as elapsed miles, days worked, or fuel consumed, and information about unscheduled failures or "discrepancies." The system then automatically manages the mix of scheduled and unscheduled work to avoid unnecessary repeat visits to the shop and optimize resource utilization. The objective is "precision execution of plan."

Once you have achieved precision execution of plan, any plan adjustments you make start to have an impact on your costs and performance. Using extensive cost and performance reporting tools available from your maintenance system, you can get almost immediate feedback on the effectiveness of any change you make to your plan.

Once the management loop is closed in this way you are "off to the races" and can start to generate savings out of your maintenance activity as if you were plucking cash from a money tree.

Let's take a hypothetical example to illustrate.

Suppose we have a 200-vehicle fleet. This fleet travels an average of 35,000 miles annually per vehicle. We have a PM cycle set at 3,500 miles for inspection and fluid change. We are a precision-execution shop, meaning we work very close to plan consistently.

It costs about $200 per visit to the shop for this PM task, including parts, labor and lost-vehicle productivity. We adjust our PM schedule to 3,850 miles and track our unscheduled repairs carefully. Predictably there is no perceptible change in unscheduled repair costs.

Yet, we have saved $40,000 per year in maintenance costs.

The key is in the "precision" of our execution. We cannot expect to achieve any savings if our execution of the existing plan completes some vehicles at 2,500 miles and others at 5,000-mile intervals scattered about, based on when it is convenient to bring them into the shop or when they happen to be broken.

There are many opportunities like this in every fleet.

Acquire a powerful maintenance system, implement it, and achieve "precision execution" by tuning up your maintenance management. Soon, your maintenance activity will start to generate savings.

Contact Norse Systems and Lief Petterson at (800) 769-8468, or by e-mail at leifp@norsesys.com