Maintenance management balanced scorecard approach for urban transport fleets

Maintenance is one of the largest expenditures for the urban transport companies together with fuel (or energy) costs and drivers (personnel) [16], but is the most important one from the view of controllability, attending that fuel and labour costs are more externally driven (crude prices volatility, taxes, personnel policies and salaries, etc.). A proper maintenance policy, managerial processes and planning and optimization of maintenance decisions, scheduling and execution of work can lead to reduce costs, improve vehicle effectiveness, reliability and performance. Consequently, maintenance function is therefore vital for sustainable performance of any urban transport fleet. Attending the responsibility of ensuring that urban fleet achieves the expected performance, maintenance managers requires a tracking system for maintenance operations performance and results [3, 6, 20, 21]. Furthermore, it is in the interest of maintenance managers to know the relationship between the input of the maintenance process and the outcome in terms of total contribution to vehicle fleet performance and strategic objectives. The measurement of maintenance performance is indeed an essential requirement for any industry of today. This tracking action can be done through development and implementation of a proper and accurate performance measurement system and indicators that are able to quantify important elements of maintenance function performance [5, 15]. Moreover, without having a formal measurement system for maintenance performance, it is difficult to control, plan and improve the maintenance process and consequently can be considered that tracking the performance operations must be a key management issue in any industrial organization. In summary, a proper maintenance performance measurement system shall contribute to: Assess the maintenance function to the strategic company tar• gets. Detect the strengths and weaknesses on the maintenance strat• egy applied. Using quantitative and qualitative data for helping to define and • stablish a continuous improvement process for maintenance. Let us to apply a maintenance benchmarking analysis within and • outside the business related with urban fleet transport.