Creating a maintenance engineering strategy rooted in reality rather than optimism is a challenge
Planning is crucial in any business and a good strategy lays a strong foundation for success. For maintenance engineers, there may be a sense that “keeping the wheels turning”' is the main objective, but an effective strategy involves so much more.
Paul Adams, a former Maintenance Strategy Manager at Glaxo SmithKline who now advises companies on their maintenance engineering approach, says a good strategy is one that achieves high uptime with low maintenance costs.
Writing for Maintenance and Engineering, Adams cautions that what works in one industry may not work in another, but identifies the following as key considerations for those drafting a maintenance engineering strategy:
- Maintenance maturity – how well developed are your maintenance processes and to what degree do they deliver value for the wider operation?
- Performance – what levels of availability do you achieve with your assets? Measures such as overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and achievement of service level obligations are good ways to measure this.
- Asset care approach – are you running to failure, applying preventative maintenance or using predictive maintenance and why have you chosen your approach?
- Team – it’s vital to involve the whole team in creating the strategy or you will miss out on what may turn out to be crucial insights from individuals.
- Capability – make sure you have the right competencies in place throughout your strategy.
- Culture – any change in business impacts the culture of the organisation. You need to ensure that you don’t perpetuate problems by rewarding the wrong behaviours.
- Communication – use the appropriate language. Selling your strategy to the board means speaking the language of business, but you will need a more practical approach when talking to your teams.