Projects

Maintenance Quality Assessment Program (MQA) Business Process, Maintenance Performance Measures

Project Description

The Problem: The New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) is responsible for providing a safe and efficient transportation system for its citizens and other users of the state owned 44,000 lane mile highway network. This highway and bridge infrastructure represents a significant investment of public funds and as such, NYSDOT is obligated to protect the investment by ensuring that it is maintained to a reasonable level of service.

Because of constrained budgets, NYSDOT leadership, like those of other state DOT’s, must make funding trade-off decisions between maintenance and preservation programs. Ultimately this effort comes down to establishing network, system and asset based levels of service (LOS), setting appropriate performance targets, collecting the right data, analyzing that data to determine needs and costs, and then understanding the anticipated outcomes, benefits and consequences of funding decisions.

NYSDOT wanted to take an objective review of their current MQA program and associated business processes to identify refinements that can be made to fully leverage MQA data for work planning and budgeting and eventually incorporating these changes into the MMS.

The Solution: The Kercher Group presented NYSDOT staff with options for refining its MQA program so that it can be used as a more effective tool for planning and budgeting purposes. Further, The Kercher Group worked collaboratively with NYSDOT staff to identify, refine, align or enhance specific business processes associated with the performance and reporting of maintenance activities (in house and contract), e.g. activity codes and reporting of work accomplished, that are necessary for developing formulas used to calculate workloads and budgets using MQA data.

Benefits: The Kercher Group offered a set recommended actions to enhance and extend the MQA program, and provided a working example of the methodology used to generate workloads and budget based for a target LOS using MQA data.

With this data, a maintenance needs report can be generated addressing required funding levels, a strategy for prioritizing maintenance operations, and areas of excessively high or low maintenance. This maintenance condition survey is the first, and perhaps the most important, step of a maintenance management system.