The often infantile relationship was summed up by an amusing anecdote encountered during the research for this month's maintenance feature. The tale involves an engineer who grew so sick of one pernickety operator fiddling with his machine set-up that he opened the equipment up and disconnected the keyboard controls. Our oblivious operator clocked in and manoeuvred the control stick into the sweet spot with trademark nonchalance. Presumably, post shift, he told all and sundry that things had never run so well.
There hasn't been a better ruse since my brother dropped a lit banger firework down from the top bunk. Joking aside, tit for tat spats between maintenance and production damage all sides.
When communications breakdown, it's not long before the plant follows suit. A failure to agree planned or routine maintenance schedules is a recipe for poor machine care. Even worse, safety can be compromised as kit runs on into the red zone or engineers rush repair work to avoid the wrath generated by a ruined production schedule.
The uncomfortable truth is that it's down to you, the plant manager, to mediate. Adopting the guise of a parent pulling apart a couple of warring siblings is a good start. Sit your maintenance and ops teams down and remind them that, ultimately, they're both on the same side. If ops don't permit essential asset care then someday soon product doesn't get out of the door. And remind your maintenance guys to check the production schedule before rocking up with a toolkit and TPM manual on a manic Monday.
Setting a joint project between the two departments is a terrific olive branch. A shared goal can quickly turn open defiance into mutual alliance. Stand side by side with C shift during peak production or attend a 3am engineering breakdown call and even sworn enemies will quickly see one another from a more enlightened perspective.
Discover more tips on maintenance best practice at WM's Factory Safety and Maintenance Conference this June (www.maintenance-conference.co.uk).
