A Clear View of the Big Picture

Before diving into detailed diagnostics, it’s critical to understand the broader context of maintenance and reliability performance.  Once we’ve defined our problem statement, mapped our decision tree, and built our initial hypotheses, the first analytical step helps us examine the full system—like viewing a plant in context to the company and broader industry to understand how maintenance and reliability practices are influencing the overall operation.

Just as a telescope allows us to survey the big picture from afar, this phase of the analysis helps  identify whether maintenance and reliability are contributing to broader issues.  Importantly, the goal here is not only to validate whether M&R is a significant factor, but also to quantify the size of the opportunity.  Even if M&R turns out not to be the primary driver, this analysis still delivers value by ruling it out and sharpening our focus on the actual root causes.  If M&R is a primary driver to our problem statement we can transition to a detailed analysis and test specific hypotheses.

This article outlines the key components of a comprehensive broad-based analysis across three primary dimensions: trends and key ratios, production reliability, and equipment reliability.

Trends and Key Ratios: Finding Early Signals

A core part of the telescope analysis phase is understanding trends and ratios that provide early signals of underlying problems.  We focus on four key areas: costs, labor, safety and capital investments.  For each area, collect data and look at trends over time.  Calculate ratios and metrics to make comparisons with internal or external benchmarks. 

Cost Analysis

Start by evaluating total production costs and how maintenance expenses contribute.  Break down maintenance cost categories such as labor, materials, and contractor usage.  Examine these as percentages of total cost and compare them with industry benchmarks.  Are your costs in line with best practices?  If not, how far off are they?

This step helps quantify the potential for cost savings and performance improvements.  It’s not just about the absolute numbers—trends over time and deviations from industry norms tell the story.

Labor Metrics

Next, examine your maintenance workforce.  Key ratios include:

• Mechanics to supervisors
• Mechanics to planners
• Direct to indirect labor
• Ratio of Replacement Asset Value (RAV) to craft headcount
• Overtime rates

Look at workforce trends such as frontline employee turnover and average time to retirement to assess future risk and potential knowledge loss.  These metrics help identify whether the labor structure is supporting or hindering M&R performance.

Safety Performance

Safety is a leading indicator of operational health.  A key metric here is the Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR).  Poor safety performance often correlates with poor work planning, inadequate training, and excessive reactive maintenance—all red flags in the broader M&R context.

Capital Investments

Review capital spending patterns, particularly the balance between new equipment and replacement.  Plants that underinvest in replacement often struggle to maintain reliability, making it difficult to execute proactive or condition-based maintenance strategies.  This analysis can reveal whether equipment condition is holding back M&R effectiveness.

The overarching goal of this trend and ratio analysis is to quantify how far off your plant is from best practices and identify where performance is improving—or deteriorating.

Production Reliability: Linking Maintenance to Output

The second dimension of the telescope analysis evaluates the relationship between maintenance and production reliability.  There are three major areas of focus: production output, maintenance work management, and shutdown/turnaround effectiveness.  

Production Performance

Analyze basic production metrics: revenue, output volume, product cost, and losses (e.g., idle time, scheduled and unscheduled downtime, speed and quality losses).  Convert these into meaningful financial terms—what is the cost of reduced uptime or quality losses?

Compare current performance with internal benchmarks, theoretical maximums, or industry standards.  This helps determine whether increased reliability could generate measurable production and financial gains.

Work Management

Review your current mix of work order types: planned, corrective, emergency, and reactive or break-in work.  Reactive work is often 3-5x more expensive than planned and scheduled work. A high percentage of unplanned work suggests underlying problems in work management or preventive strategies.

Shutdown Effectiveness

Evaluate how time and money are spent during planned shutdowns.  Review trends in shutdown costs, durations, and frequency.  Are shutdowns well-managed or a source of major inefficiency?  Often, shutdown performance is a lagging indicator of upstream issues in planning or equipment condition.

Equipment Reliability: Getting Ahead of Failures

The third lens of the telescope focuses on asset health and reliability fundamentals.

Preventive Maintenance (PM)

Assess the quality and effectiveness of your PM program.  Review documentation to ensure tasks match known failure modes and are being performed at the right intervals.  Analyze if PMs are identifying issues early enough to prevent downtime.  Also uncover if they are generating corrective work.

Evaluate PM compliance and supporting practices such as cleaning procedures, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and essential care routines.

Criticality Analysis

Many sites lack a robust or actionable criticality ranking system.  Even where criticality analyses exist, they are often underused in PM plan development and work prioritization.  Review the current state of criticality rankings and whether they inform maintenance strategy.

Materials Management

Investigate the link between material availability and maintenance execution.  Key indicators include:

• Materials cost as a percentage of total maintenance cost
• Time planners and mechanics spend sourcing parts
• Storeroom staffing and organization

Equipment Pareto and Condition Data

Conduct Pareto analysis to identify high-impact assets or systems.  Use data such as Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) to pinpoint problem areas.  Consider techniques like jackknife analysis to identify the impact of frequent minor stoppages on production throughput. 

Additional Tools: Document Reviews and Case Studies

Supplement your analysis with key document reviews and case studies.  Collect a sample of documents that will help uncover the current situation.  Review documents related to work management  (e.g., notifications, work orders, standard job plans) to assess if the planning and scheduling processes are driving desired outcomes.  Review PM plans, inspection findings and QA/QC reports to assess the effectiveness of the preventive maintenance program.  Review bills of material, material master records, and storeroom inventory records to uncover problems with master data that lead to inefficiencies in work execution and extended downtime. 

Case studies help put our situation in perspective.and avoid the assumption that a problem is specific to one plant when, in fact, it may be systemic.  Reach out to other plants in the company or a knowledgeable resource outside your organization to get an objective view of the data.

A Clear View from a Distance

The telescope analysis is a crucial first step in any maintenance and reliability improvement effort.  It allows you to understand the magnitude and nature of the opportunity before diving into detailed root cause analysis.  Sometimes M&R is not the primary issue.  Uncovering this fact is a success, as it helps refocus efforts.

In future articles, we’ll explore the microscope analysis phase, where we zoom in to identify specific, actionable improvements at the equipment and process level.  But for now, a wide-angle lens is the best place to start.