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36 MoldMaking Technology —— APRIL 2017 MAINTENANCE MATTERS Metrics for Assessing Maintenance Skills By Steve Johnson Mold maintenance and repair technicians embody a unique blend of experience, trade skills and atti- tudes that can be a challenge to motivate, manage and assess. For most mold repair technicians, the job requirement is simple: Get your mold repaired and/or PM'd on time and don't screw it up. How well this is accomplished is typically a subjective evaluation that can be skewed by personalities and other relationship factors that do not capture the real value of a repair technician. Since the repair technician's job description, qualifications, direction and goals are not so clear, assessing their value can be confusing. To be more objective, tangible metrics are a must. These met- rics then can be compared to shop averages for all repair technicians to help determine areas of opportunity for more hand skills, machine training or troubleshooting in the eight stages of repair: preparation for preventive maintenance, disassembly, troubleshooting, correc- tive action, cleaning, assembly, final checking and staging. A repair technician is hired with the expectation that he has the mechanical skills to disassemble, clean, repair and reassemble expensive molds correctly and safely, but doing all these things efficiently and proficiently is the key. Before we get into metrics, it is impor- tant to understand the difference between effi- ciency and proficiency. It is entirely possible to be efficient but not proficient when it comes to mainte- nance skills. A repair technician can fly through repairs, finish- ing many more molds over time than his or her peers, for a high efficiency rating, yet can create more mold/product issues due to bad habits and careless workmanship than someone else who is slower, but more methodical and a better troubleshooter. The goal for managers is to be able to measure both styles with metrics that tell a story over time. So, how do we determine efficiency? How do we measure it? How do we use metrics to motivate and challenge techni- cians? Can we really lower maintenance costs? How much does our maintenance strategy and shop culture influence repair technician performance? Let's take a look at a few metrics to consider when assessing the skill levels of mainte- nance repair technicians. Cost of repair. A popular key performance indicator involves a computerized maintenance management system program that allows the user to predetermine how long a specific job should take for typical mold PM. It then calcu- lates the percentage of time that the repair technician meets the shop's goals. The problem is that this method only con- siders the labor hours involved. This means the repair techni- cian's goal is only to move through the PM quickly, cleaning the mold and replacing tooling, as required. This method does not accurately reflect the cost-of-repair proficiency score, in which defects discovered, corrective actions, repeating defects, and other results of the repair or PM can be better understood. These figures can then be used in conjunction with cost-of-repair efficiency metrics to cre- ate a benchmark for employee/shop comparisons to identify training needs, shop-environment issues or technician com- pensation. This is a much fairer indicator of overall skill level. Degree of difficulty. One factor that always gets men- tioned in repair-skills assessment is the types of molds on which the repair technician works. Many times, a technician is assigned a mold that is much more challenging than aver- age, and this can lead to hard feelings when his work is com- pared to (or scored against) that of a technician working on simpler tools. To level the field, our shop created a degree-of- A repair technician is hired with the expectations that he has the mechanical skills to disassemble, clean, repair and reassemble expensive molds correctly and safely, but doing all these things efficiently and proficiently is the key. Molds, and the products they produce, present a variety of challenges for repair technicians, which makes classifying each mold with a degree of difficulty essential for efficient and proficient mold repair. Image courtesy of MoldTrax Maintenance Solutions.