Are Most Maintenance Organizations Overstaffed?

The maintenance impact on manufacturing results has traditionally been measured in terms of cost. As equipment reliability became a focus area in our industry, the strategic value of maintenance effectiveness became apparent to business leaders. For mill leaders, this brought the dilemma of balancing a need to reduce costs with an expectation that reliability must improve. From a total corporation view, wide disparity among site results establishes the need to lead and support change in maintenance performance. It is this kind of variability among sites that provides the opportunity to improve performance.

Some plants have planners, schedulers and supervisors, while others have stop planners and daily planners separated. A few keep electricity and instruments from mechanical planners, while some plants are more bare bones. It makes a big difference if the planner can 100% dedicate his or her time to planning, instead of having to take care of purchasing orders, train workers in the CMMS, attend improvement meetings, and so on. It’s the same thing with the supervisor role. Can he or she focus on their team or he/she expected to run a few improvement projects and renovations? The more we tack on to these roles, the less time will be left for leading their workers.

REM recently caught up with Christer Idhammar, founder and executive vice-president of IDCON INC, and asked him to share his perspective on World Class maintenance.

Unless you're lucky enough to own your own paper mill, chances are you sometimes have to live with management decisions that differ from those you might have made on your own. So let's move forward and assume your company is going to implement pay-for-knowledge. It's not all bad. Not only are there various ways to cut your potential losses; there are even some positive benefits you can achieve if you do things right.

Digital maps for plants and factories help employees navigate the facility, track assets, and enable inventory audits for better equipment maintenance are in demand.

With the increased globalization and with companies acting globally, the need for a common understanding of the indicators to measure maintenance and availability performance is increasing, and there is no doubt that this activity in a short period of time will be a part in a global standard for maintenance indicators. This is highlighted by the fact that COPIMAN (Technical Committee on Maintenance of the Pan American Federation of Engineering Societies) is joining the comparison effort.

Baby Boomers are going to retire soon. There won’t be enough skilled labor to fill all the jobs. Employers aren’t prepared to handle the labor shortage. It goes on and on. So, is this workforce shortage thing for real? Well, YES! The numbers don’t lie. By 2012, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) estimates there will be 165 million jobs and only 162 million people available in the workforce.