By Joseph Fishel
The task of measuring productivity in the HTM world has been a cause for discussion over the years and continues even today. I attended the MD Expo in Dallas and a lively topic of discussion was how productivity should be calculated? Some of the questions that came up were, “Do you document everything you do?” “How do you account for lunch hours and breaks?” “What is the benchmark – 70%, 80%, 90% or 100%?” All of these are questions that have held up the true explanation of productivity which is, “How can you tell if a technician is productive?”
For years, the accepted calculation was to compare hours available to hours worked. This is only an accounting of time not if someone was productive. In the manufacturing industry, my productivity was measured in how many “working” halogen light bulbs I could make in a shift. In the HTM world, we have all kinds of different tasks that pull us in different directions. But, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really tell us if a technician was productive or not.
Early in my career, I oriented with a tech at another facility prior to his vacation. I was going to be covering the infusion pump desk in his absence. He instructed me to only fix eight pumps a day. His justification was there are only eight work hours in a day and it takes an hour to work on one. That was his standard and he did not want me to screw it up for him. When I showed up on Monday, I could not get to the desk because of all the pumps on the floor awaiting attention. I started by assessing a pump and 15 minutes later, I had identified the malfunction, cleared the error and set it up to run for volume testing. I now had 45 minutes to sit around. I could not take the inactivity. I commenced to plug in pumps to charge them, as well as turning them on to see what was going on. I was able to set up four calibration stations to verify the accuracy. By the end of the day, I had put 16 back in service. By the end of the week, I had touched 102 pumps and returned 96 back into service. I could now walk to the desk without tripping over pumps. We both worked a 40-hour week and documented our work, but the number of repaired devices was 40 to 96. Over the same time span, I was about 141% more productive.
To play a game, we always set the rules first. For determining productivity, you need to set the rules or boundaries.
- What time should we include in a work order?
- Should we include the true hours available to work?
- Do you count 15-minute breaks and lunch breaks?
- What are the true available hours to work in a day (8, 7.5, 7)?
- Do we document all our time and what we do? Do we include the time to travel up to the floor and retrieve a device as well as returning the device back to the floor?
- Do you include the time to search for a part even if it is 10 to 15 minutes?
- Getting a purchase order number, either for a part or if the device needs to be sent out?
- The time to procure packing materials and boxing up a device?
- Arranging and processing a loaner?
- Identifying clearly what is admin time, project time, rounds and any other specific classification of a work?
This standardizes the documentation so everyone is doing it the same way. This is important so that you can compare apples to apples. Documenting what you do in your 8 hours is just that – documenting what you did.
The easiest way to start looking at productivity is to pick one model of a device that the majority of the techs do PMs on. IV pumps would be high on my list to start with. I would choose comparing PMs as the steps are already standardized by the manufacturer. There are two benchmarks you should incorporate into your computations. The first benchmark is the manufacturer’s estimated PM time. The second is to take the average PM time from a year of data. Next, separate out each technician’s average PM time for the same device model and put them on a graph. This will give you a picture of where everyone is in their productivity when it comes to that model of device. When you look at a chart below you can see that Techs 1,2,6 and 7 are performing a PM in a time shorter than both the facility average and the manufacturer’s estimate.
Tech 1…………………………..15
Tech 2…………………………..25
Tech 6…………………………..29
Tech 7…………………………..32
System Average……………..39
MFR…………………………….45
Tech 4…………………………..48
Tech 8…………………………..51
Tech 3…………………………..52
Tech 5…………………………..59
From the chart above, we can see which one of our techs is more efficient doing pump PMs. If there is a step that takes a minimum of 15 minutes (such as a volume infused test) I would question the quality of the PM by Tech 1.
Now that you have completed productivity analysis for one device, I would look at what the top 10 devices are and do the same. Once you have them give each tech a simple score for each device category based on where they stand. If they ranked third on an ESU then give them a 3. Then total up each technicians’ scores and this will let you see where each tech stands regarding productivity compared to the other techs.
After you have done the PM numbers for all devices then start on correctives and then look at admin time, travel time, project time and any other categories. You will only have an average benchmark from your site, but it will assist you in seeing where time is being spent. No one is 100% productive, but everyone can document how they use 100% of their time.
No matter the calculation it comes down to the need for accurate documentation. As members of the HTM community, we should share our suggestions and work together to create standards.
Joseph Fishel is a business process consultant/HTM for Nuvolo.
