Focus on Reliability

Do you find yourself wondering why your employees haven't taken the initiative and approached you for additional training? Well, they must not want the extra training, right? Wrong! Sometimes, employees do want training, but they just don't ask. Here's why:

How many technicians per planner-scheduler? Should we focus on system ownership, or business goals? Find out this and more with our video, and register for our class here!

I’ve been having interesting conversations lately via e-mails, Linkedin, assignments and also at conferences. I’d like to talk about what I’ve seen and heard specifically at a couple of conferences that I’ve spoken at recently. The conversation usually starts with some disgruntled maintenance supervisor or manager telling the people around him or her that they are just not getting the results they expected from their planning and scheduling system or their PM program really doesn’t seem to be delivering what they expected - some may even be bold enough to point the finger at the guys on the shop floor. What happens next is that they get a bunch of heads nodding and comments like ‘Yeh feel the pain and me too.’

Over the years I’ve had many conversations with organizations around KPIs – what they are, and equally as important, why they are. When I’ve asked why people measure what they do, I have received several different answers, ranging from:

Recently, after our Planning and Scheduling Webinar, a question came up around the partnership between Operations and Maintenance in the Scheduling process. The observation from the enquirer was that even though the Planning process may be moving along nicely the partnership in the Scheduling process seems to lag behind. So, what can we do to accelerate the strong partnership between the groups?

In the first blog entitled ‘I Just Can’t Get Buy In’ we concluded that when we find ourselves in a situation where Change hasn’t gone the way we wanted, we have no option but to trace the steps back and find out where the initiative went off track. In the example, we used which involved moving from one on one shift communications to computer recorded, it was that some employees had English as a second language. Quite often it is not something as drastic as that but no matter what the reason for the sidetrack it is only recognized after a failure. This approach is very much like employing Reactive Maintenance as your maintenance strategy – we wait until something fails and do whatever we need to fix it.

For many organizations, finding qualified maintenance technicians is a real challenge. While not a new problem, it is becoming much more pronounced depending on their level of pay and geographical location. More companies are looking internally with the intent of developing their own workforce to take on new responsibilities.

Organizations typically fall into one of three categories. Reactive, emerging proactive, and proactive. Then we have those organizations that were proactive but have fallen back into the reactive cycle of despair. The statistic of over 60% of all organizations being reactive in their maintenance processes probably doesn’t surprise many of you, especially if you live in that environment.

Struggling to put together a complete weekly schedule? It may surprise you, but you’re not alone.  Although the processes of work execution (preventive and predictive programs, planning, scheduling, coordination, storeroom and production partnerships) are foundational, many groups struggle to put it all together well. Without this foundation, more advanced concepts fizzle out quickly. Frustration ensues. There are many pieces that need to align to complete the entire work execution puzzle. To start, let's focus on developing the weekly maintenance schedule. There are some basic steps that you should address to move things forward.

Many times we hear this refrain along with, “I’ve told them what needs to be done, but they don’t seem interested!” Who is “them?” It could be your boss, your peers, or those working in the same department. If you’re a Maintenance and Reliability leader, it could be the tradespeople you work with – but it doesn’t matter who it is, the problem’s the same. You have identified a need for change, someone has told you that you need to change or you’ve simply been given the change to implement. Of the three, the last is the most difficult as the actual change has been foisted upon you and so hopefully the person doing the foisting has read this article and found a way to get your buy-in!