August Issue of Maintenance Nuts & Bolts

This month's tip, Maintenance Without Money, was the topic of a conference speech in late 2008 and early 2009 when maintenance budgets started to dry up. It has since evolved into a short course teaching how to manage maintenance activities in these trying times.

I hope some of the ideas offered below will be some help.

Next Month's Tip: How to Make Backlog Work for You

Have a great month!

Michael Cowley, CPMM

President

PS: Training classes will be starting up again soon, check out the dates and topics and... plan to attend.

TIP OF THE MONTH

Maintenance Without Money

When business is good and we are making a lot of money we cover or hide our asset management sins. When things get financially tight all of the dirty laundry gets put on the clothesline right out in our front yard.

I developed some guidelines and suggestions that will hopefully assist maintenance managers in surviving during these tight times. There are numerous items to be considered such as:

supervision
managing overtime
maintenance work schedules
out-sourcing and out-tasking
deferred work
repair parts and,
purchases

For this tip of the month, we will tackle, what I feel, is the most important one, Supervision!

I assess and consult with many organizations yearly and by far, the single most important item that affects efficiency and costs is the lack of competent supervisors on the floor or in the field with their employees. One typically sees them in the office behind a computer or on the phone performing planning and scheduling duties instead of management and or leadership responsibilities.

Here are some tips that might assist in accomplishing this:

Review and manage supervisors' meeting schedules
Clerical work - review to see if this can be delegated to someone else in the organization
Work order management - can technicians complete the paperwork instead of the supervisors
Parts ordering - consider planner/scheduler positions to handle the majority of parts issues

The bottom line is if you allow a supervisors to supervise and spend 70-80% of their day in the field with their people, you will see dramatic improvement in safety, cost, productivity, customer satisfaction, maintenance morale, and many more. So, the challenge is... How do I find the time?

Good Luck

Mike Cowley

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