Maintworld 3/2017

BENCHMARKING
Benchmark among similar
companies
In quantitative benchmarking methods,
the basic assumption is that the companies
are similar enough to be compared
if they operate in the same industrial
branch. In real life, the diversity of the
companies can be extensive and poses
a major drawback. If the benchmarked
companies differ too much from each
other, the benchmarked company is
barely able to find the right development
targets or even recognize the companies
that should be a valid reference group.
With the proposed approach based on
categorizing sites to comparable units
and benchmarking them against each
other, the best practices will depend on
the business environment. Thus, the
first step is to recognize similar kinds of
companies that can best learn from each
other.
In this context, similarity means that
companies are comparable according to
the aspects affecting asset performance
and asset management practices. As the
focus is in the development of maintenance
service offerings, the benchmarking
method categorizes sites or
plants according to their maintenance
environment. ”A maintenance environment”
collects together the data arising
from those sites that are similar enough
with respect to external aspects affecting
maintenance activities as illustrated
in Figure 3. Maintenance environments
describe features that affect the requirements
for the maintenance function and
include maintenance policy and maintenance
activities. Features describing
a maintenance environment include for
example: availability of competent employees,
climate effect on maintenance
conduction, life cycle phase of equipment,
maintainability of equipment, etc.
From a service provider’s point of view
these aspects are external and cannot be
controlled by a service provider.
Data collection
The benchmarking method requires a
quantitative data set that contains variables
about the maintenance environment,
applied maintenance practices
and level of success. CMMS or other
databases seldom contain such statistical
data that is relevant from the benchmarking
point of view. Thus, part of the
method development was to establish a
questionnaire for the data collection.
Figure 1.
Example of
data collection
questionnaire
The questionnaire includes 34 questions
that help to categorize the sites to
different maintenance environments,
recognize maintenance practices and
calculate a key performance indicator
to assess the successfulness of a site (see
Figure 1). The service provider carries
out the data collection in normal business
negotiation situations. For this
reason, the length of the questionnaire
has to be reasonable and the questions
should be easy to answer. The number of
the questions is as small as possible and
whenever possible the questionnaire
offers ready alternatives. Pre-defined
answer alternatives also support automated
data analysis that allow discussion
about results immediately after entering
the data items.
Figure 2.
Main phases of
benchmarking
Figure 3. User
interfaces of the
benchmarking
tool, which
allow data
collection and
data analysis in
a meeting with
a customer
Developing targets
based on benchmarking
Benchmarking is a tool to find out potentially
weak points in the operation
and offers an input for detailed discussion,
and planning and prioritizing for
development actions. In the developed
benchmarking method a site under study
is, based on the questionnaire entries,
categorized to one of the pre-defined
maintenance environments according to
its similarity index value. The similarity
index indicates the closeness of the site’s
answers to the profile of a pre-defined
environment. As illustrated in Figure 2,
all sites belonging to the same maintenance
environment are extracted from
the benchmarking database for further
analysis. The best sites of a particular
36 maintworld 3/2017