James Reyes-Picknell — Active Contributor

These days everyone seems to be cutting spending. It’s entirely discretionary, so it’s easy to eliminate. But is that a smart move?

But today, times are tough. Trade wars, protectionism, and generally sluggish economies before those were a factor have all contributed to poor corporate performance. Shareholders want more. But can you really cut costs to become profitable? No – of course not, at least not in the long term. Cost cutting, if not done intelligently, is an immediate measure that often ends up reducing capability and / or capacity and leaves the organization weaker than it was before. [Read more…]

This one is a HUGE MYTH. Maintenance costs are a direct result of what you do and what you do produces capacity for service delivery or production (depending on your business). Cost is a consequence of your actions, available cash (in a budget) does NOT determine what you will spend. [Read more…]

The last article speaks to who should run your storeroom – NOT maintenance. It also leaves us hanging a bit – what should go into the store room to ensure good supply of needed materials, when needed? [Read more…]

Perhaps the number one excuse that maintainers use for being unable to get repairs executed in a timely manner is to blame parts and their supply. For the maintenance technician on the tools, it’s a very obvious problem. No parts or materials means that work simply cannot be done without some sort of work-around / jury-rigged solution. The alternative is to get the needed materials as quickly as possible – often incurring substantial premiums on the price of the materials and premium shipping charges. When the parts arrive, usually after some waiting period, all emphasis is on getting the job completed even if it requires overtime effort and costs. This makes compliance to budget a real challenge and invites plenty of queries from accounting, finance and general management about our ability to work within a budget. As fire fighters we are sometimes heroes, but as managers we are failures. [Read more…]

Many believe that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. That’s just not right. Measurements can only count what is countable – dollars, production numbers, headcounts, timeliness, etc. They can’t count the achievement of objectives unless those objectives are purely numeric in nature. [Read more…]

In theory, integrated computer systems enable multiple uses for any single piece of data that is input only once. Data becomes available wherever it needs to be in whatever business process is integrated into the whole. In a sense it is like our brains – information and experience is registered once and available for access whenever needed for any purpose. Integrated systems should make our lives at work easier, but they seldom do that. Integrated business computer systems are very complex and can be very difficult to use. Imagine that they must support many separate business processes and departments, all of whom have different “languages” and ways of doing things. [Read more…]

You’ve acquired and are now implementing a new CMMS / EAM (Computerized Maintenance Management System / Enterprise Asset Management) computer software program to help you manage maintenance. It may be a simple functional system that only looks after maintenance and likely Maintenance, Repair and Operating (MRO) spares, or it may be part of a much bigger enterprise system that handles many business functions. Regardless, one question almost always arises when converting from one to another system – what should we do about our old data? [Read more…]

Technology provides us with some fantastic tools to help us work better, smarter, faster and more efficiently. BUT, it doesn’t help us think any better. We can actually get too dependent on it and our thinking is weakened. If you don’t believe that, just watch what happens when you try to buy something and the computerized cash register goes down. Can they actually take payment? And if you use cash, can the clerk make proper change without looking at the cash register to tell them how much to give you. [Read more…]

Even if you have excellent planning and scheduling, you may still experience excessive downtime. Some consultants will promise that you’ll save a great deal of money with good P&S simply because planned and scheduled work is less expensive to execute. They are partially right too! But that’s only part of the picture. [Read more…]

Surprises happen anywhere and to anyone. In your operation, you can expect that regardless of your best efforts, some work will arise that must be done right away. Most would call these emergencies.

To me, an emergency is something that is or is about to have a MAJOR impact on: Safety (i.e.: injury or death), Environment (i.e.: a major incident that is likely to get you fined or shut down), or Production/service delivery (i.e.: irreparable impact on the bottom line in the financial reporting period). [Read more…]

A lot of people think about this one, but their actions reveal that this myth underlies what they are thinking.

Shutdowns are major undertakings performed when production is at a standstill (zero revenues) and because of the scale of the work being undertaken, costs are at a high point. There is a natural and well-justified desire to minimize the duration and frequency of shutdowns. [Read more…]

This myth, is about who should plan your work and there is plenty of confusion around this one. For the most part, I’d agree that planners should do this, but not all – see below.

First understand that all jobs should be planned and those plans should be saved as “standard jobs” (or whatever you want to call them) in a job plan library. Plans should be written once and then used many times. Each use, subjects the plan to what is happening in the field and therefore each plan is subject to upgrading with each use. Feedback from the trades in the field triggers that continuous improvement loop that keeps plans current and ready for next use. [Read more…]