Operations & Maintenance Archives

Maintenance Management

Should You Contract Out Maintenance?

As an option to reduce plant costs, plant managers may consider contracting out maintenance work. This may have some merit, depending on many factors, including the nature of the business. One question that may be asked is, “Is maintenance a part of our ‘core business’?” Let’s look at a couple of examples. If the business is a hospital, where revenue is generated by the sale of medical services, and maintenance consists of a few specialized activities, such as janitorial, H&V system servicing, and repair of advanced medical diagnostic and monitoring systems, then contracting out these activities is almost certainly the best approach.

Maintenance Management

Maintenance Cost and Estimated Replacement Value

Yesterday you were a happy camper. Today you are told your Maintenance Cost (MC) as a percent of your Estimated Replacement Value (ERV) is 4.9%. According to Consulting, Inc. and your corporate management 4.9% is way too high. Good performers are under 3%, some operations are even under 2%. So, the question is what are you going to do about it Mr. Maintenance Manager?

Maintenance Management

Workforce Development

Big changes are happening in today’s workforce. These changes have nothing to do with downsizing, global competition, or stress; it is the problem of a distinct generation gap. Young people entering the workforce are of diversified background and have much different attitudes about work. They want a life‐work balance. They want to be led, not managed — and certainly not micro‐managed. The new mode is flexibility and informality. A large proportion of our managers of the veteran era have been trained in relatively autocratic and directive methods that don’t sit well with today’s employees. Are we preparing our workforce to meet tomorrow’s need?

Operations & Maintenance

Cost-Benefit Analysis and Projecting Project Payback

A cost-benefit analysis can help maintenance and engineering managers determine how well or poorly a planned action will turn out. It helps determine if it’s a sound investment or decision. Managers are faced with the similar situations face much higher risk and consequences if they don’t perform the analysis correctly. The process involves comparing the total expected cost of each option against the total expected benefits to see whether the benefits outweigh the costs and, if so, by how much.

Maintenance Management

Wrench Time – Why the “FEAR” to Measure Maintenance Productivity?

The best results of maintenance practices carried out in enterprises critically depend on the efforts of maintenance staff to ensure their day-to-day actions comply with the schedule of services in order to avoid unwanted failures, correctly diagnose the behavior of active production processes, and ensure quality information recorded in the work orders.

Operations & Maintenance

Beginning a Maintenance and Operations Partnership

Plant pros often talk about the importance of a maintenance, operations and engineering partnership. In my experience, the discussions commonly center on very general terms such as better communication and understanding. Those issues are important, but we need precise rules and actions to drive that partnership long term.

Operations & Maintenance

The Financial Benefits of Reliability

When manufacturing organizations look to asset reliability to improve their facilities, there is often one main driver behind this decision: financial performance. There are many reasons to employ reliability practices including improved safety and production, but many companies focus on reliability initiatives because they touch so many aspects of the business and yield strong financial results. This article provides a guide to the processes, mindsets, and organizational characteristics necessary to achieve optimum financial results through reliability initiatives.

Operations & Maintenance

You Cannot Lose With Training

There are so many positives involved in training your employees that you cannot lose. It’s a definite win situation for any management group. The trick is to turn it into a win/win for both you and your staff. To do this, you must choose the right training.

Operations & Maintenance

Rethinking the Decision Factory

What do knowledge workers actually do? Clearly they don’t manufacture products or perform basic services. But they do produce something, and it is perfectly reasonable to characterize their work as the production of decisions: decisions about what to sell, at what price, to whom, with what advertising strategy, through what logistics system, in what location, and with what staffing levels.