Last week, Parsable Global Supply Chain Manager Jaime Urquidi and SEE Solutions President Hank Ward shared their expertise during the webinar “3 Secrets to Increase the Effectiveness of Maintenance Teams.” (You can access the webinar—and submit questions for the presenters—right here.)
Below, find a rundown of the secrets they explored during the webinar.
Operators are the key to improving the effectiveness of the maintenance team.
- They are the key to preventing forced deterioration and identifying hidden abnormalities through cleaning.
- As owners of the equipment, they are the final defense against failure. There is no substitute for an operator who displays true ‘ownership’ of her equipment—she knows what good condition looks like, sounds like, feels like and smells like. When something isn’t right, she will be the first to know it.
- Operators want to do more of the maintenance on their equipment, which leaves the technicians more time to dedicate to precision repairs.
The technician is the most important element in reducing the amount of time required for maintenance planning/scheduling/execution.
- The notification is the single most important step in the process; it should be created by someone qualified to thoroughly assess the situation and make repair recommendations (typically the technician).
- Scoping the work to be completed should be done by the person or team most likely to complete it (typically the technician). Factor into this the ‘additional’ time a technician knows he will need to complete a ‘precision’ repair.
- The technician wants to provide excellent information, but we don’t make that very easy for him, what with the lack of informational templates, the demand for typing skills, the time needed to sit at a terminal and create notifications and order history, etc.
The reliability of a system and its related equipment is directly proportional to the investment made in the flow of information.
- Poor decisions are being made every day, not because information doesn’t exist, but because we fail to make it available to the people who actually need it.
- Processes are rarely re-engineered to promote information flow, they’re typically re-engineered to promote activity flow.
- Everyone has information, knowledge, experience, expertise and ideas they are not sharing—not because they won’t, but because they can’t.
