Road to Reliability Scorecard
Where you stand across all four elements of the framework. Under ten minutes.
Site Assessment
Find out what is really holding your plant back
An independent assessment of your maintenance operation, conducted on site by Erik Hupje. You get an accurate read of where you stand, a dollar figure on the opportunity, and a prioritised roadmap your leadership team can act on.
On site1 or 2 weeksFrom USD 35,000
Fit
Who it’s for
This is for maintenance and operations leaders who know something is wrong but cannot get agreement on what, or cannot get the budget to fix it. You have the reports and the KPIs. What you do not have is an independent read on where the real constraints sit and what has to be done first.
This is for you if:
Your team is firefighting and you want an outside view of why, backed by evidence rather than opinion.
You need a written case you can take to a budget holder.
You have tried improvement initiatives before and they faded.
You have an executive sponsor at director level or above who wants this done.
The sponsor We only take on assessments where there is a sponsor at director level or above. That is not a formality. The findings will point at things that cross department boundaries, and without someone senior who owns the outcome, a good report sits in a drawer.
Two products
Two ways to run it
Same method, same report. The difference is how wide you go. Both run as one or two weeks on site.
Road to Reliability Site Assessment
A whole-of-site look across the four elements of the Road to Reliability™ framework: planning and scheduling, preventive maintenance, defect elimination, and leadership and culture. Run this one when you know performance is poor but not where the constraint actually sits. It is scoped to what your site needs rather than run to a fixed checklist.
Planning & Scheduling Site Assessment
A deep dive on planning and scheduling alone, scored across ten elements so you get a baseline you can measure against again later. Run this one when you have already concluded planning and scheduling is the problem and you need the detail.
Not sure which? Start with the free scorecards. The Road to Reliability Scorecard covers all four elements; the P&S Scorecard goes deeper on planning and scheduling. Whichever one tells you the most is usually the assessment you want, and we will confirm it on the discovery call.
Looking for training rather than a diagnosis? The assessment tells you what to fix. If you already know that and want your team taught, the Maintenance & Reliability Best Practices workshop and the Maintenance Planning & Scheduling workshop are five days on site with up to 25 of your people.
Deliverables
What you get
A written report your leadership team can circulate, a verbal summary before Erik leaves site, and a formal presentation once the report is done. Both assessment types produce the same set of deliverables.
In the report:
An executive summary. It stands on its own, for the people who will not read the rest.
What is already working. Every report opens here. There is always something worth building on, and naming it is what makes the rest safe to circulate.
Direct answers to your questions. Whatever you raise at kick-off gets answered explicitly, up front, with references into the detail.
Where you stand. Across the four elements of the framework or, for a Planning & Scheduling Site Assessment, scored across ten elements from reactive to proactive.
Ten to sixteen observations. Each backed by CMMS data, meeting observation, field observation or corroborated interviews. Not opinions.
A dollar figure on the opportunity. With every assumption shown.
Sequenced recommendations. With a clear argument about what has to happen first and why everything else depends on it.
An implementation roadmap. Laid out by quarter.
A record of what the assessment drew on. Every meeting attended, every role interviewed, every document and data extract reviewed.
Confidentiality and limitations. Stated in the report.
How the close-out works Before Erik leaves site he walks your leadership team through what he has found, verbally, while everyone is still in the room. Then once the report is written and your team has had a chance to read it, there is a formal presentation online to take you through it properly.
Scope
What we assess
A Road to Reliability Site Assessment covers the four elements of the Road to Reliability framework: planning and scheduling, preventive maintenance, defect elimination, and leadership and culture. Alongside those, Erik looks at what your site’s risk profile demands: how your CMMS is used day to day, how roles and accountabilities are drawn, and whether leadership behaviour supports the process or works against it.
A Planning & Scheduling Site Assessment goes deeper on one of those four, scoring your operation across ten elements, each rated from 0 to 5 against three bands: reactive, effective, proactive.
The ten elements, in work order lifecycle sequence:
- Business process
- Identify & prioritise
- Plan work
- Schedule work
- Execute work
- Monitor work
- Close out work
- Review & improve
- Leadership
- Competence
Process
How it works
Three phases. One assessor, on site, in your meetings and in the field.
- Phase 1
Before Erik arrives
You get a document and data request: process documentation, work instructions, position descriptions, org chart, meeting schedules, KPI reports, and raw extracts from your CMMS covering notifications, work orders, backlog, schedule compliance and PM compliance. It all gets reviewed before he lands, and that analysis is what surfaces the questions worth testing on site.
- Phase 2
On site
Four to five days, or eight to ten for the two-week assessment. Erik sits in your routine maintenance meetings as an observer, interviews people at every level from the executive sponsor down to technicians and warehouse staff, walks the site, and works through the data with your people. It closes with a verbal summary to your leadership team before he leaves.
- Phase 3
After
The report is written off site. Once it has been issued and your team has read it, there is a formal presentation online.
The business case
Putting a number on it
Improvement cases stall when nobody can put a number on them. So the assessment does.
The gains come from three places. Maintenance productivity is usually the biggest: Erik estimates your current wrench time, the share of your technicians’ paid time actually spent on the tools, and compares it to a realistic target of 45%. The gap converts into execution capacity, expressed as the equivalent number of technicians you would have to hire to get the same result. Cost reduction comes mostly from optimising preventive maintenance, where 40 to 60% of tasks typically add little to no value, and from reduced contractor spend. Uptime improves as unplanned work falls away.
The report turns that into an annual figure and a ten-year net present value for your site specifically, with every assumption written on the same page.
A sizing exercise, not a guarantee The wrench-time figure comes from observation and interviews, not from a measured time study, and the report says so. It gives your leadership team an order of magnitude, which is what a budget submission needs.
Want a rough number before you commit to anything? The Wrench-Time Calculator gives you one for your own plant, free.
Scope limits
What it doesn’t cover
Worth being clear up front, because these get assumed.
No measured wrench-time or DILO study. Wrench time is estimated from observation and interviews.
No benchmarking against other companies. You are compared against known good practice and stated targets, not a peer database.
No audit against a standard. This is a diagnosis, not a compliance review.
No costed implementation plan. Recommendations are sequenced and argued, but they do not carry budgets, owners or effort estimates.
No CMMS master data or configuration audit. The assessment looks at how your system is used day to day. Auditing how it is configured is a separate exercise.
If you need any of these, raise it on the discovery call and Erik will tell you honestly whether it fits and where to go if it doesn’t.
Why independent
Why an outside view is worth paying for
Everyone on your site already has a theory about why things are reactive, and most of those theories are partly right and shaped by where the person sits. What is usually missing is someone with no stake in the answer who can look at the data, sit in the meetings, talk to people at every level, and write down plainly what is going on.
The pattern that turns up most often is not that people do not know what to do. It is that the process exists, the tools exist, and they are not followed. That finding matters, because it rules out the two answers organisations reach for first: writing more procedure, and adding more system controls. Neither fixes a problem of capability and accountability.
The assessor
Erik Hupje runs every assessment himself
He has spent more than 25 years in maintenance and reliability in asset-intensive plants across oil and gas, mining and chemicals, built the Road to Reliability framework, holds the CMRP, CRL and CAMA certifications, and is a Chartered Professional Engineer. You get the practitioner who built the method, on your site, in your meetings. Not a team of analysts with a checklist.
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Meet ErikAfter the report
What happens after
An assessment is not an end in itself. It tells you what to fix, in what order, and what it will take.
Where the finding is that the process and the tools already exist and are not being followed, that rules out the answers organisations usually reach for. More procedure will not fix it and neither will more system controls. What is left is capability: people knowing what good looks like, and then getting support while they build the habit. Training gets a team to awareness and knowledge. Skill comes from practice with someone coaching. That is the honest reason a course on its own so rarely changes a site.
Where it goes from there:
1. See where you stand. Free: the Road to Reliability Scorecard, the P&S Scorecard and the Wrench-Time Calculator.
2. Diagnose. The Site Assessment.
3. Build knowledge. Online courses for your planners, schedulers, supervisors and engineers, priced on a cumulative discount that applies across every site and country you have. Technician training is quoted separately.
4. Build skill. The Tool Time Sprint, twelve months of coaching while your team does the implementation.
5. Keep it. Every seat carries the Turnover Guarantee: if someone leaves within two years of starting a course, we train their replacement free.
You are not committed to any of it. Plenty of clients take the report and run the work themselves, and the recommendations are written so they can.
Pricing
What it costs
Indicative pricing. We scope each assessment to the site.
Two lengths:
- One week on site: from USD 35,000. Four to five days on site.
- Two weeks on site: from USD 60,000. Eight to ten days, at one site or across several.
Both assessment types are available at either length.
What the fee covers
The days on site are the visible part. The fee covers the whole engagement: reviewing your documents and analysing your data before Erik arrives, preparation, the site visit, writing the report, and the close-out presentation to your leadership team. The report is the product.
Travel
Quoted as a fixed amount before the engagement starts, on top of the fee. No expense reconciliation afterwards.
More than one site
Where several sites can be covered within the same trip, the price is the same, because the assessment is priced on time rather than per site. How many sites fit is something we work out with you when we scope it.
Payment
By invoice via bank transfer or company credit card, or by purchase order. Terms are flexible and we work to your internal process.
Our commitment At kick-off you write down the questions you want answered. The report answers each one explicitly. If it doesn’t, tell us and we’ll rework it until it does, at no charge.
Getting started
How to start
Assessments are by application. Erik runs a limited number each year and only takes on work where there is a sponsor at director level or above.
Start with a discovery call. You will talk through what is happening at your site, who needs to be involved, and which of the two assessments fits. If neither does, you will be told so.
Before the call, the free scorecards and the Wrench-Time Calculator will give you a rough picture of where you stand. The scorecards take under ten minutes.
P&S Scorecard
A deeper read on planning and scheduling alone. Under ten minutes.
Wrench-Time Calculator
A dollar figure on the productivity opportunity at your own plant.
Proof
What a Site Director said about it
Erik completed a site assessment of our refinery and took a pragmatic approach to observing, interviewing, and attending our routine maintenance processes and people. His key observations were very accurate given the time he had spent on site, and was able to articulate and prioritise a roadmap of improvement activities for us to work on. That roadmap was articulated and the recommendations enabled us to prioritise where we should focus on for improved reliability. I am proud to say that we have taken much of what Erik has recommended on board, and are currently working through the process. Maintenance improvement is not a short term task, but a holistic programme around Routine Work, Asset Integrity, Preventative Maintenance, and Defect Elimination which we were very happy to partner with Erik for his expert experience and observations. I would recommend Erik's work to any prospective company looking at improving their maintenance and hence their bottom line.
The assessment uses the Road to Reliability framework, built on more than 25 years in asset-intensive operations. Reliability Academy has trained over 2,500 professionals in more than 100 companies and 80+ countries since 2018.
FAQs
Site assessment FAQs
Which assessment do we need?
If you know performance is poor but not where the problem sits, take the Road to Reliability Site Assessment, which covers all four elements of the Road to Reliability framework. If you have already concluded planning and scheduling is the issue, take the Planning & Scheduling Site Assessment, which goes deeper and gives you a scored baseline. Both run as one or two weeks. The free scorecards usually make it obvious, and we will confirm it on the discovery call.
How long does it take?
Four to five days on site for the one-week assessment, eight to ten for the two-week. The report date is agreed with you when we scope the engagement.
Who do you need to talk to?
People at every level, from your executive sponsor down to technicians and warehouse staff. Erik also sits in your routine maintenance meetings as an observer. Typically ten to twenty individuals and small groups for a one-week assessment.
What do you need from us beforehand?
A document and data pack: process documentation, work instructions, position descriptions, org chart, meeting schedules, KPI reports, and CMMS extracts covering notifications, work orders, backlog, schedule compliance and PM compliance. You get the full list once dates are set.
When do we hear the findings?
Twice. Erik gives your leadership team a verbal summary before he leaves site, then presents the finished report online once your team has had a chance to read it.
Do you measure wrench time?
No. It is estimated from observation and interviews, and the report says so plainly. A measured time study is a different exercise and does not fit inside an assessment.
Will you compare us to other companies?
No. You are assessed against known good practice and stated targets rather than a peer benchmark database.
Who sees the report, and what happens to our data?
The report belongs to you. Erik is the only person who conducts the assessment and writes it, and every report carries a confidentiality and limitations statement. We will sign your NDA on request. We keep your report and the supporting data indefinitely, so we can help you with follow-up questions years later, which clients regularly ask for. We also use anonymised patterns across assessments to improve our own products and training. Nothing that identifies your site, your people or your data leaves us. Where your NDA sets different terms, your NDA applies.
Do we have to buy training afterwards?
No. Plenty of clients take the report and do the work themselves. The assessment is a standalone deliverable and the recommendations are written to be actioned by anyone.
Why do you need an executive sponsor?
Because the findings will cross department boundaries, and fixing them takes decisions above a single department. Without someone senior who owns the outcome, the report will not get acted on. It is a condition of engagement, not a preference.
What does it cost?
Indicative pricing is from USD 35,000 for one week on site and from USD 60,000 for two weeks, plus a fixed travel amount quoted before we start. The fee covers the document and data review beforehand, the site visit, the report, and the close-out presentation.
How do we pay?
By invoice via bank transfer or company credit card, or by purchase order. Terms are flexible and we work to your internal process.
Can you assess more than one site?
Yes, where they can be covered within the same trip, at the same price. How many fit depends on the sites, and we work that out with you when we scope the engagement.
What if the report doesn’t answer our questions?
At kick-off you write down the questions you want answered, and the report answers each one explicitly. If it doesn’t, tell us and we’ll rework it until it does, at no charge.
Stop guessing why your plant is reactive
You already know something is wrong. An assessment tells you what, what it is worth fixing, and what has to happen first.