9: Performance Improvement and Capital Productivity

I was perplexed. I had been called in to a mining company to figure out what was wrong with their underground maintenance department. Availability of equipment was in a terrible mess. I went through all of the metrics on such things as the balance between predictive/preventive maintenance and emergency repair, mean time between failures, mean time to repair and so forth, but I could not put my finger on what was wrong. When I visited the underground workshop, it appeared to be clean and efficient. Then I noticed something that I thought was counter-intuitive: there was a strong positive correlation between equipment availability and the utilisation of available hours for virtually every type of equipment.