Imagine you’ve just read a task on your Maintenance Work Instructions, “Adjust a fan belt.” You, having prior experience, decide to adjust it to a particular tension.
Meanwhile, your colleague interprets it differently and has different prior experience and adjusts the fan belt to a slightly different tension.
Who has completed the maintenance task correctly? It’s impossible to say with the vague instructions in the Maintenance Strategy (or Work Instructions).
While relying on the experience of long-term employees is great, it doesn’t help when the knowledge is embedded in their heads and not documented for the entire maintenance team to view. Failure to document this into a Work Instruction means that it is impossible for new (or even temporary/stand in) team members to know the correct way to perform the maintenance tasks specific to the asset.
If the above scenario had a more specific task embedded within the Maintenance Work Instructions , it would read like so: “Adjust the fan belt to a deflection of plus or minus three millimetres.” Now when following these instructions, everyone knows what is required precisely and most importantly, they can achieve the correct outcome.
How do you create a PM task that eliminates the guesswork?
• Refine the tasks required for each asset.
• List detailed, step-by-step instructions for each task
• Identify allowances for human judgement
• Identify scenarios when human judgement is NOT allowed
• Perform a ‘dry-run’ to test the effectiveness of the instructions
• Identify any holes in any of the tasks’ instructions
• Update PM task in the Maintenance Work Instructions as required
• Ensure you have acceptable limits included, as defined by the OEM