Operational Problem

A facilities team had a large, growing backlog of statutory inspections with significant risk of non-compliance.

Task

To identify the root cause(s) of the growing backlog, create a plan to eliminate the backlog as quickly as possible thereby assuring compliance.

Solution(s)

A cross functional team was formed to solve the problem and a workshop to brainstorm potential root causes was held. Each of the potential root causes was investigated and facts gathered to either disprove or substantiate each theory. It became apparent that:

1) The work was being scheduled by a remote team that had poor understanding of the airport geography and individual technician skill sets. This resulted in inefficient allocation of work.

2) Maintenance tasks were assigned to a particular technician. If a technician was on holiday or off sick, the task would remain invisible to the Facilities team.

3) The technicians were exploiting a flaw in the process that encouraged them to decline work that could not be completed to schedule, either due to lack of correct equipment, lack of time or lack of skills. This resulted in low technician productivity and the need to reschedule the inspections that had not been undertaken (double handling by scheduling team).

The remote scheduling was replaced with an automated sorting of maintenance tasks, prioritised by a simple algorithm. Tasks were no longer assigned on the sceduling system to individual technicians. Instead, they were assigned to a shared work bucket. The on-duty maintenance team leader would manually assign work to his technicians.

Result

>100% increase in productivity across all FM tasks, including inspections

Backlog was eliminated within 3 months

1 x FTE scheduling resource was redeployed

11 x FTE technicians were redeployed to new terminal once compliance was achieved

OpSolved!