What the British Museum wouldn’t give for the hoards of antiquity lurking in the typical factory’s maintenance department.The engineers are veteran; the machines they are servicing vintage, according to the findings of WM’s Maintenance & Asset Management Report 2015.
More than 50% of site engineers reported sustaining ageing assets as their top priority. An identical finding to our survey results in 2013 and 2014. Except this time around the kit is sporting one to two more years wear and tear and one to two fewer maintenance team members to look after it.
An astounding 42% of factories have lost at least one maintenance engineers due to retirement in the past year. More than 70% of sites said the exodus had left them with a skills gap that would take at least six months to fill. A quarter will be running on auxiliary power for one to three years or more.
Gathering storm for breakdowns
An obvious response, you might think, would be to ramp up the department’s recruitment of engineering apprentices. A strategy rich in long term gain, if not relief from the short term pain. And yet, the survey offers another double take moment with the fact that 52% of sites have no plans to take on a maintenance focussed apprentice this year.
The gathering storm for a spate of catastrophic breakdowns gathers pace when you factor in spiralling production demands. “The perception and support of maintenance is poor,” bemoaned one survey respondent. “We have reducing experience due to retirement and ill health of personnel and that has a big impact on supporting old assets which are expected to run at all time high productivity rates.”
Plant is neglected and lacks investment
Ageing assets plus diminished maintenance expertise multiplied by increased run times. You don’t need to be Albert Einstein to work out that’s a formula for soaring downtime. Around 52% said their downtime had remained at 2014 levels or worsened. “We’re expecting old equipment to produce more with little or no improvement,” said one respondent. “Plant has been neglected with a lack of investment over many years combined with poor management and maintenance regimes which result in many failures to ageing plant,” pointed out another.
The cost to the bottom line of all those run to failure breakdowns doesn’t bear thinking about. And for a third of site respondents it really doesn’t. This sizeable group of engineers, come ostrich impersonators, said they had no idea how much equipment downtime had cost them in lost productivity over the past year.
A figure of between £25,000 and £100,000 was most common (26%) for engineering departments who were bothering to count. One in ten sites reported lost productivity of £250,000 or more. Yet even in the darkness of all the profit draining downtime, there is light.
On the plus side, the report finds almost eight in ten sites have adopted a preventative or pro-active approach to asset care. Around 73% of plants also possess a formal maintenance strategy. A blueprint, by definition, which must surely have to address a plan B once retirement means there’s more asset knowledge at the local bingo club than in the maintenance office. The proposed counter measure at many sites is indeed a cunning one.
Around eight in ten are extending some form of maintenance activity to the wider factory team. From cleaning and lubrication tasks to condition monitoring - maintenance is no longer a minority pursuit. Around 40% have instigated a technical operator role: fusing maintenance skills with those of shopfloor operator. This hybrid ‘maintainerator’ role was profiled in Works Management’s March issue (WM, March, p34), issue where we looked at its role in boosting asset care at Coca-Cola, Sidcup and Alcoa, Kitts Green-(proper hyphen) both Best Factory Award winners.
The confluence between operations and maintenance is certainly proving good for morale. Almost 65% noted true collaboration between their maintenance and production departments. Just 5% noted the ‘we make it, you fix it’ mentality of old. Not a single respondent reported lingering animosity between the two sides.
Desegregation between traditional maintenance and production boundaries is also being supplemented by extensive training programmes, the report found. More than 70% said they would steer improved maintenance performance in the year ahead by upping training of their existing teams. By contrast, just 9% are turning to a maintenance outsource partner to achieve the same ends.
The commitment to coaching appears to be coming up trumps in a cohort of sites. Some 37% had managed to reduce downtime amid this culture of continual upskilling. “We carry out failure reviews to obtain root cause analysis and corrective actions means increased collaboration with production,” said one of the enlightened breed. “The development of the maintenance team and our ability to work together has been critical in reducing downtime,” said another.
'We need more apprentices'
Overall, 65% of respondents ranked their maintenance team as sufficiently skilled to get the best out of assets in most circumstances. A further 67% classed their team’s performance as good or very good. But behind the bravado there lurks some serious doubts. Detailed knowledge of asset and maintenance systems were both named as glaring weak spots in the site engineering’s dwindling arsenal.
Retirement means specialist skills, the institutional knowledge of a generation of maintenance personnel, is about to exit the factory gates. Counter measures such as training up what’s left and delegating asset care to operations can help keep us going in the short run. However, a basic root cause analysis will tell you that only by significantly boosting our recruitment of maintenance apprentices will we find a lasting solution for driving the long term performance of business critical machinery.
Methodology: The Maintenance & Asset Management report questioned 1017 senior site managers at a breadth of different manufacturing businesses on their experiences of plant maintenance. Around a third of respondents were heads of maintenance. Respondents represented businesses large and small employing anywhere from 1-49 staff to over 500 on site. The respondents were drawn from a plethora of manufacturing sub-sectors including automotive, food & drink, chemicals and electronics.
Have your recruited an apprentice to your maintenance team? Tell us about it. Email Max Gosney at mgosney@findlay.co.uk
