Maintenance is a critical service that can create additional value for your organization. Too often, maintenance is seen through a cost center lens, resulting in repeated budget cuts rather than strategic improvements that improve both effectiveness and cost performance. We have found that most heavy industrial asset operations could realize significant financial benefits through properly informed improvements to maintenance management, strategy, and organization. With the right approach, maintenance organizations can improve equipment reliability and support greater production throughput, while also providing the best maintenance cost performance.
Our approach is based on a holistic, data-informed review of your
maintenance and reliability organization that identifies improvement
strategies tailored to your organizational maturity, asset base,
operating context, and market pressures. Our methods improve the
effectiveness and efficiency of your maintenance and reliability
organization by tackling root causes ranging from maintenance business
processes and work order management to equipment strategies and
specific reliability-centered maintenance challenges.
Key Challenges
Our Strategy & Solutions
T.A. Cook’s teams of specialized consultants, engineers and
development coaches provide a unique approach to operational
challenges to develop and implement programs that increase and
sustain our clients’ profitability. Each project is run by T.A. Cook
with client participation throughout and is governed by clear
accountabilities, milestones and expectation of measurable benefits.
With our DRIVE approach, we use agile increments that
focus on specific performance levers to achieve rapid and
quantifiable improvement results. We apply high performance coaching
and performance monitoring to enable these changes and make them
sustainable across the organization.
See our DRIVE change management page
for more details.
Our Service Offering
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Many organizations have analyzed and made improvements to their maintenance program, but few have truly optimized the business of maintenance. Where does your organization stack up against world-class industry leaders and how can your maintenance department break out of the cost center mold and add real value? Our analysis pairs data-rich benchmarking via our Maindex database with the deep insights of true maintenance and reliability experts, guided by our MainMap assessment tool. Our cross-functional teams include maintenance, reliability, and operations technology experts. The result is a full picture of where you are today, an understanding of where you stand against industry competition, and a customized roadmap to unlock greater value.
Current State Analysis & Benchmarking
Many organizations have analyzed and made improvements to their maintenance program, but few have truly optimized the business of maintenance. Where does your organization stack up against world-class industry leaders and how can your maintenance department break out of the cost center mold and add real value? Our analysis pairs data-rich benchmarking via our Maindex database with the deep insights of true maintenance and reliability experts, guided by our MainMap assessment tool. Our cross-functional teams include maintenance, reliability, and operations technology experts. The result is a full picture of where you are today, an understanding of where you stand against industry competition, and a customized roadmap to unlock greater value.
Maintenance Business Strategies
The most successful organizations take an approach that quantifies and optimizes the maintenance organization’s value in enabling production output. Our approach takes into account maintenance, reliability, and operational context factors to accurately plot where your maintenance program stands in the bigger picture and how to optimize the value maintenance provides to the organization. We support the creation of strategies that are informed by the best in reliability and digital analytics, including:
- Strategic asset management plans
- Effective equipment strategies
- Selected maintenance strategies
- Contract and contractor strategies
- Organizational structure. See Operations & Asset Management for more details
Optimized Work Order Management
Maintenance productivity is greatest when the work order management process is humming. The basic mechanisms for work identification, prioritization, planning, scheduling, execution, and closeout are well established. Regardless, most organizations still struggle to overcome a reactive culture and inefficient work-arounds that cripple quality and productivity. We have extensive experience in creating healthy processes and cultures around work order management. Additionally, we have specific expertise to improve, train, and coach on your work identification, gatekeeping/prioritization, planning, scheduling, and execution. From planning and scheduling best practices and tools to the implementation of planner norms and even precision maintenance techniques, we can address your needs from start to finish. In all, our approach is proven in improving hands-on-tool time (HoTT) productivity by 30% or more for most clients, as well as creating better, more proactive maintenance results that lower costs and improve overall equipment effectiveness.
Reliability, Analytics, and Digital Tools
We tailor our approach to integrate the right people, knowledge, and tools from across our expertise areas for each project. We aim for every maintenance project to incorporate our reliability analytical capabilities and expertise. Additionally, we bring a unique combination of maintenance, reliability, and operations technology expertise to help you apply the right digital technology to optimized processes. Please see our Reliability and Digitalization expertise pages for more information on those areas.
Maintenance Business Processes
Even if work order management and maintenance strategies are in good shape, many organizations still suffer from inefficiencies in their maintenance business management processes and approaches. Our experts bring a unique combination of business acumen and maintenance expertise to help you get the most maintenance and reliability value out of:
- Spare Parts and Warehouse Management. For more details, see our Spare Parts and Warehouse Management page.
- Data-driven budgeting and planning
- Contract and contractor management
Success Stories
"Thanks to T.A. Cook‘s coaching and tenacity, our OEE transformation was successful, visible and tangible."
Featured Insights
Create an effective maintenance strategy with RCM
With pressures of profitability looming over project construction teams, asset intensive facilities are often handed over to owners and operators without a robust maintenance plan.
Cut the FLAB: 6 finacial benefits gained through precision maintenance
Precision maintenance is where rubber meets the road in any effort to improve the mechanical reliability of your equipment. The best laid plans, from equipment strategies to detailed job packs, will disappoint if you do not execute with precision.
5 key actions for asset reliability in the “new normal”
Reliability tools and strategies offer proven ways for plants to make risk-informed decisions and right-size their maintenance approach. Giving the right attention to the right assets now will position plants for a rapid return to full utilization down the road.
5 innovative Robotic Solutions for Smart Maintenance
To ensure maintenance becomes more efficient, teams of scientists are in the process of developing and testing a variety of innovative technologies. We introduce some of the latest applications, how they work and in
