Maintenance Self-Check: Fast and easy

How good is our maintenance organization? What are its strengths and weaknesses? And what subject areas need to be included in a maintenance analysis in the first place? With Maintenance Radar,  Bilfinger has developed a new tool that addresses these questions – and that is available to all interested parties free of charge on the Internet. Franz Prattes, Global Development Director – Consulting & Products at Bilfinger, explains how the tool is structured and what it can do.

Mr. Prattes, what is Maintenance Radar?
Maintenance Radar is an internet-based tool that forms part of our  Bilfinger Maintenance Concept (BMC). It makes it possible for plant operators to perform a self-check and determine in just a few minutes what the strengths and weaknesses of their current maintenance organization are. This enables initial indications of the improvement potentials to the existing status to be identified quickly and without complications.

How does the tool work?
The application is very simple: The plant operator either goes to the relevant website himself or he contacts us and we go through the analysis together. He is asked ten questions that cover all the main aspects of maintenance and to which he gives a self-assessment using a sliding scale. Once he has answered all the questions, he receives a visual presentation of his answers in the form of a spider diagram. This shows where improvements to the current maintenance approach are possible and perhaps even necessary.

What kind of information do you expect from these ten questions?
The range of topics is quite broad: There are questions about HSE performance as well as maintenance costs, planning and scheduling in relation to work orders and the status of digitalization. Evaluations are also carried out on availability, the execution of maintenance activities, maintenance organization and even maintenance software. We have drawn on our decades of expertise in the maintenance of a wide variety of plants in a range of different industries in compiling and formulating these questions.

Who can benefit from the tool?
We have phrased the questions in such a way that the Maintenance Radar is adaptable to all industrial sectors. It is industry-independent and applies to both large and small organizations. In this respect, every plant operator can use this tool to get an indication of where there is potential for improvement in their maintenance activities. 

What happens once the questions have been answered?
Although the Maintenance Radar provides some important initial indications of the areas in which current maintenance can be improved, it does not, of course, provide an in-depth analysis. We therefore recommend a more detailed look as the next step – with our Bilfinger Maintenance Analysis (BMA), for example. As part of this analysis, we interview employees and managers from maintenance, procurement, engineering and production and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the existing maintenance organization along with its processes. On this basis, targets can then be systematically defined and measures to improve the existing organizational structures and processes can be developed and implemented.

Maintenance Radar
With Maintenance Radar, plant operators can carry out a self-check of their maintenance performance – and use this information to identify initial optimization potential. The free self-check consists of ten questions and converts the results into a spider diagram.
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