Below are the first 10 and last 10 pages of uncorrected machine-read text (when available) of this chapter, followed by the top 30 algorithmically extracted key phrases from the chapter as a whole.
Intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text on the opening pages of each chapter.
Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
Do not use for reproduction, copying, pasting, or reading; exclusively for search engines.
OCR for page 68
Chapter 3: Measurement
RESOURCE MEASURES
The next broad class of measures needed for benchmarking is
resources composed of labor, equipment, and material, as well as
financial costs.
Labor
Labor is an important input to the production of maintenance
products and services. In benchmarking, you need an overall
measure of the quantity of labor that is used to produce a
maintenance product or service or undertake an activity. The
quantity of labor is measured in terms of person-hours of
labor. Person-hours equal regular hours plus overtime hours.
Try to separate travel hours (i.e., time to go from the garage to
and from the worksite). Some agencies require workers to report
travel hours in addition to regular and overtime hours.
Eventually, as you become more deeply involved in
benchmarking and desire to understand your practices in
detail, you will want to distinguish between labor hours of
different quality. Measures of quality pertain to training,
education, and experience. The productivity of different people
is not a measure of quality; productivity is the output of labor
that is achieved as a result of labor hours expended and the
quality of the labor.
As you assemble labor data to support initial benchmarking
and for subsequent comparison of your own and "best"
practices, you should break down your labor hours by
categories that distinguish the levels of training, education,
and experience of different personnel. You can do this by
categorizing labor hours expended into one or more of the
following:
Wage class or other class of personnel (e.g., equipment
operator or not);
Number of years of experience; or
Documented training or certification to perform certain
types of activities or to use certain types of equipment
(e.g., herbicide application).
70
OCR for page 69
Key sources of labor data are the agency's maintenance
management system and the payroll system. Some agencies
might also have a database containing information on the
training of each employee.
Equipment
As with labor, you will need an overall measure of the
equipment used. Equipment quantity consists of the number of
hours each type of equipment is used or some metered
measurement of usage--for example, a truck odometer reading.
Equipment quality is determined by the type of equipment, its
condition; frequency of breakdown; and operator requirements,
which relate to the ease of operation and number of operators
required. In preparation for analysis of best practices and
comparison to your own, try to categorize your equipment
along these different dimensions of quality and to measure
equipment usage of each in hours, by odometers, or both.
Information on equipment type and utilization usually can
be obtained in a maintenance management system, an equipment
management system, a financial management system, or in
all three.
Material
You will also need a measure of material usage. Material usage
can be measured by the physical quantity of each type of
material used to deliver a specific maintenance service or
product or to undertake a specific activity. Examples of material
use are the number of signs and posts, linear feet of guardrail,
tons of pothole material, and gallons of crack sealant.
Selection of the proper units to measure material usage
requires some care. For example, it might be better to measure
signs replaced not by the number of signs replaced, but by the
area of the sign facing, which reflects the magnitude and
difficulty of putting up or replacing a sign. Alternatively, one
could count both the number of signs replaced and the number
of signposts. The number of signposts required might be an
indicator of the difficulty in replacing certain types of signs.
71
OCR for page 70
Chapter 3: Measurement
Various information on materials used can be found in the
maintenance management system, material management system,
financial management system, or in all three.
Costs
Another measure of resource utilization is the total dollar costs
of using the labor, equipment, and material involved in
delivering a maintenance product or service. Sometimes,
however, it is better to employ measures of the raw labor,
equipment, and material inputs instead because there can be
local and regional differences in the unit cost of labor,
equipment, and materials. If you use total resource costs or even
costs of each input to maintenance production, you will not
easily be able to distinguish to what degree the physical inputs or
variation in price of inputs are contributing to the outcomes.
If physical measures of labor, equipment, and material resources
are not available and only cost data is available, then cost data
can be used as a measure of resource utilization. Indeed, one can
argue that expressing all resources in financial terms results in
convenience of analysis and, in some cases, in a better measure of
resource utilization than does separate usage rates for labor,
equipment, and materials.
Note that if a maintenance cost index that varies by year and part
of the country is available, you can use dollars as a measure of
resource costs and can normalize the costs by geographical area
for any past year covered by the index.
It is important to understand that even if you do not use resource
costs when you measure performance, once you have identified
best performers and improvement opportunities and begin to
analyze the effect of adopting best practices, you will need cost
information in order to estimate potential cost savings or the
costs of improving certain outcomes.
Variable Costs
Wherever possible, you should distinguish between variable and
fixed costs. Variable costs vary with output and include labor,
selected equipment costs such as fuel, and material costs.
Variable costs do not include overhead and other fixed costs.
Therefore, fixed costs should be excluded from your measures of
labor, equipment, and material input.
72
