How High Precision Job Planning, Complete Kitting, and Tooling Discipline Multiply First Pass Quality and Maintenance Productivity Several Times Over
Maintenance organisations that consistently outperform their peers do not, in the main, owe their advantage to better technology, better instruments, or larger headcounts. They owe it to a small number of operational disciplines, applied without exception, over a sustained period. High Precision Planning and High Precision Maintenance, the practices that emerged from process-industry attempts to eliminate maintenance variability and that integrate naturally with the lean tradition of waste reduction, are among the most consequential of those disciplines. The numbers reported by sites that have implemented them in earnest are striking: first-pass-quality improvements of 2.5 times, productivity ratios of 3:1 or higher between planned and unplanned work, and equipment running for years rather than months between interventions. The numbers, however, are the consequence and not the cause. The cause is the discipline of precision planning, kitting, and tool readiness that produces them.