Auditing Maintenance

Departments

Introduction

Maintenance auditing is a structured process of ‘inspection and checking’ the strategy, organizational structure and systems of the maintenance management department. Its purpose is to:

(i) map and describe the operation of the existing management procedures;

(ii) assess the procedures in the light of general managerial principles and concepts, and against internationally established best practice;

(iii) identify the strengths and weaknesses of the department;

(iv) formulate proposals for reinforcing the strengths and eliminating or reducing the weaknesses of the department.

I have been invited to undertake industrial audits for a variety of reasons:

The General Manager of an aluminium smelting operation wanted to know how well, in terms of equipment performance and maintenance costs, his maintenance department was operating compared to those of other smelting works. He wanted strengths and weaknesses identified. This is the standard reason for an audit.

In addition to wanting the above, the management of Chapter 1’s food processing plant also required advice on a revised maintenance strategy which would cater for the plant moving from 15-shift to continuous operation.

The management of a pharmaceutical plant had decided to acquire a new computerized maintenance documentation system and needed to clearly identify the ‘user requirements.’

A large company, operating many cement plants , wanted to make meaningful comparisons of one with another and also with the plants of other companies. To this end, the most productive plant was to be audited to set up appropriate benchmarks.

The BCM approach of Chapter 1, adopted in conjunction with the human factors approach of Chapter 2, facilitates the assembly of a comprehensive list of checkpoints and questions ordered according to the methodology model of Figure 1–3. This audit aide-memoir (see Appendix 1) lists the information required when mapping, modelling and auditing the maintenance department and its linkages with other company functions, such as Production, and its logic informs the construction of the audit programme (see next section). It also acts as a check list during the audit to ensure that all the information needed has been collected. It is not used during the interviews.