Improving Data Consistency and Accuracy for Maintenance Work Orders

By Gary Vansuch, Walter Garcia & Jennifer Turvey

October 8, 2014 

Did you know that the Colorado Department of Transportation's (CDOT’s) Maintenance Work Order (MWO) has over 300 data fields?  That’s a lot of fields!  Many aren’t used, and many are used by some regions and not others.  Each region has done a fantastic job of creating consistency and standardization within their boundaries; however, interpreting the data they produce from a statewide perspective is challenging – much like comparing apples to oranges to strawberries. 

Maintenance workers paving a road at night

Maintenance work

Because the MWO is being used in different ways across CDOT, this can cause problems.  The use of MWOs during the 2013 Flood Response is a useful example.  Kyle Lester, Director of CDOT’s Division of Maintenance, explained, “The statewide instructions on how to fill out the work orders were not followed uniformly, which made it hard to pull cost, time, and process data. It also impeded our ability to provide proper paperwork for reporting to outside agencies, such as FEMA, which had a direct negative effect on the Federal funding we received for our response and recovery efforts.”

Lester identified the need for statewide standardization of the MWO process.  He is the primary sponsor for an improvement project that is attempting to do just that: standardizing of the MWO process.  He added, “We must be able to show with confidence the return on investment for maintenance and traffic.  Our department is given an annual budget to maintain our state’s assets. As stewards of this funding, we must be able to communicate our performance in an accurate and transparent fashion by having accurate data, accomplishments, and unit costs that are directly tied to the assets that we maintain.  Another key business requirement is to be able to tie the employee, the equipment, the location, and the materials used together in one standardized report.  When we have data being entered in a way that will result in this type of report, we will know we succeeded.”

It’s a tough issue, so Lester reached out to CDOT maintenance leaders to form a team to tackle it. The targeted outcome is to provide a higher level of consistency in the work order process and a higher level of accuracy in the data so that reporting within the Maintenance Work Orders at a statewide level delivers exactly what is needed to make business decisions.

Consistency and accuracy are tough, complex issues.  Plant Management coordinators – and managers – currently correct MWO errors to try to improve consistency and accuracy.  The graph to the right shows the number of errors for August – clearly, it is tough to get good data into the system.

The graph at the right depicts the MWO error rate for the month of August 2014.

The Project Team quickly realized that a better way needed to be identified. To drive success, the Project Team is focusing on ways to significantly reduce errors and to produce data that is standardized across CDOT.

Maintenance work order graph displaying almost 200 times a maintenance work order was sent back for re-work to employees, around 100 times a maintenance work order was sent back for re-work to supervisors, and around 1800 times that a project management coordinator had to fix items in a maintenance work order

MWO graph

The team began work in August and is continuing to define, document, and redesign this process by October 31. Implementation will begin in November and is likely to take up to six months.  “The implementation phase will take some time, but will have the same feeling of urgency so that we can see results sooner rather than later,” noted Michelle Malloy (Office of Process Improvement), who is serving as project leader. “CDOT staff who complete work orders should know that the team is keeping them in mind as they work through the project.  We want to make the work order easier to complete, cleaner to look at and provide clear and consistent direction so that users spend less time and have fewer questions about entering the data.”

Project status as of September 26, 2014

MWO III Lean Process team members