Six maintenance management errors to avoid
1. Maintain maintenance costs quickly
Reducing maintenance costs brings with it some pitfalls that can affect production. It is therefore important to consider how to put this process into practice.
The easiest way to reduce maintenance costs in any plant is simply to optimize the number of employees and reduce the number of teams. Quite logically, the consequences of such short-term maintenance management can be devastating to total costs, and problems begin to appear after a year or two due to poorly maintained assets.
Changes in maintenance costs are related to both the quality of activities and production. Improving equipment reliability will reduce costs, but reduced costs will not improve reliability. Maintenance costs cannot be reduced quickly because it takes time - improving the reliability of the equipment.
2. Fear of the myth "People don't like change"
We often hear that people do not like change. But, people are often very receptive to change, as long as they are part of the process.
Employees in a plant can identify opportunities to improve planning, can give feedback on what would make it easier for them to use the software, can feel responsible for changes and thus accept them more easily. Improving planning requires a change in culture, which usually begins with a handful of enthusiasts who are naturally receptive to the new.
3. People are our biggest asset
If you are part of the management of a factory or work in the corporate world, you know that it is relevant and fashionable to use the phrase "People are our biggest asset". Most managers would agree with this statement, but it is not always correct or appropriate for the situation. People are not the biggest asset of a company - the right people form this part, while the wrong people are liabilities.
We can confirm this statement with the question - "Is it not true that if a team in this plant loses its weakest people (about 10 to 20% of the total), the loss is unlikely to be noticed?" There is always a certain number of people in each team who do not do their job well, and in some cases even slow down the rest of the team.
It is also true that people cannot be more efficient than the system in which they work allows them to be. Management can minimize lost time and energy by implementing good maintenance and reliability processes.
4. Having more maintenance people reduces downtime
If you have a large number of emergency repairs and therefore need reactive maintenance in the company, then you need to understand why and repair their source. Hiring new technicians is not directly proportional to the problems solved. What is the solution for your plant? Here are some ideas to ask yourself:
- Do operators carry out inspections of equipment? Do operators participate in simple operational tasks? How do operators notify the support team?
- Do maintenance people have detailed inspection lists? Do they check and analyze trends to identify equipment problems? Do they change the regularity of preventive maintenance based on the service history?
- Do you have information on how involved the maintenance staff is? How do you synchronize maintenance with the production schedule?
5. It is safest to have it on paper
Surely you have come across this syndrome, and we will come across it for a long time. It takes an average of 12 minutes for an employee of the technical team to look for information about past service and 4 minutes to report it on paper. And these are just a few of the service processes that are recorded on paper. In one case, technicians waste time reporting tasks, in the other, they fail to perform them in order to respond to an urgent task. We are not convinced which of the two is more damaging to production.
Most organizations believe that moving to a paperless solution will cost more in terms of purchasing new software, hardware, and training. After the initial investment, in most cases, the companies realize their full return within the first 18 months.
6. Digitalization is a cure for all problems
We often see the maintenance organization implement a new CMMS in the hope that this new computer software will improve the reliability of the plant. In fact, the new software can be very useful, but it's just a tool.
If plant productivity improves after a change in software, it is not the software itself that contributes to these improvements, but a synthesis between implementing and implementing better workflows, changes in employee behavior, and higher quality software data.
Sometimes maintenance software updates become so cumbersome, but everyone in the chain ignores the obvious flaws for fear of looking like opposition to modernization. The result, at best, is that about 30% of the CMMS functionality is used and also only 30% of people know how to use it effectively. This results in only 9% use of the system.
If your company is about to choose a new CMMS or implement one for the first time, keep in mind that today's competitive environment provides ample opportunity for reliable solutions, which, however, have a good UX - in other words, "user experience", which within a factory, is in fact a guarantee of quality and accountability of service tasks. Fabrico is a solution-focused on the easy-to-use interface so that the support team does not waste time working with it, but on the contrary - saves time.