Focus on Reliability

A maintenance planner's job is a crucial part of any successful maintenance and reliability program. Maintenance planners have a lead role in ensuring that all equipment and machinery is properly maintained, repaired, and, if necessary, replaced in a timely manner.

This article written by Jeff Shiver originally appeared in Plant Services in June 2022

As an update, from time to time, I think that organizations have moved beyond the following story, only to find that not to be the case, especially in the medium-sized and smaller organizations ...

Sadly for some organizations, their maintenance and operations practices are not much different than the small bands of gold miners going for broke in the Alaskan wilderness as reflected on the television shows.  Operating on shoestring budget, they try to bootstrap their way along, experiencing increased losses from a run to failure mentality.  While run to failure can be a strategy for some equipment, it shouldn’t be for all of your assets, especially the critical ones.  Proactive organizations learned a long time ago that you can’t typically sustain your business with that approach.

Still the most challenging topic most companies face in maintenance and reliability is one of leadership. Many organizations feel that they are not achieving the effectiveness and efficiency they believe they should due to a lack of understanding of leadership. The one thing that has stood out in my recent visits to organizations to help with this challenge has been the lack of a fundamental of leadership – managing. The interesting part is that each organization recognized they needed work on things like motivation, inspiration, involvement, engagement etc. but none recognized that their structure and systems for managing were broken. If we don’t have the systems in place to manage and control how do we expect to demonstrate those afore-mentioned traits of leaders? We need to remember that a good manager may be a good leader, but good leaders MUST be good managers. Too often we think of leadership in the philosophical terms that were mentioned but as the leadership guru Peter Drucker’s “Effective leadership is not about making speeches and being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.”

Having Leadership and Supervision issues at your site?  Want to make a change ? Let us bring our Maintenance Leadership and Supervision Course to you.   

How many times have you walked around a hardware store or a kitchen store and seen a tool or instrument that just made you shake your head and say to yourself ‘Wow if I’d had that when I tried to do…………………………….. life would have been so much easier!’

The CMRT Exam is the leading credentialing program for the knowledge, skills and abilities of maintenance and reliability technicians. 

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!