The Human Side of Maintenance

We’ve had the good fortune to work with various functional groups, including operations (from job shops to high-speed lines), purchasing, plant accounting, IT, shipping and receiving, production control, engineering, marketing, sales, and plant maintenance. Of all the groups, sales had the most challenging culture to work with. They are highly motivated (probably due to commissions!) and very knowledgeable about the complex topics of products, markets, and customers. The nature of their work makes them loquacious and quick-witted. They can also be volatile and quick to judge. They can light up the rumor mill in a heartbeat.

The Maintenance Culture

Maintenance is close behind. They have a high sense of pride in their skills, are usually the most senior employees in the plant, and are very knowledgeable of the complex topic of their assigned equipment (troubleshoot, repair, overhaul, and operate!). They have a problem-solving mindset. They can also be stubborn, set in their ways. Their seniority in the plant organization provides them with a highly effective network. In fact, one time, while working with a team at one end of the plant property, the results of our team session reached the other end of the property as soon as the team session ended.

Good Guy/Bad Guy.

Another characteristic is unique to maintenance. This is the hero/villain, or love/hate, relationship with their customers (the people who use the equipment they maintain).

By its nature, on one hand, maintenance is “bad news” for operations. When they show up, something’s wrong. Or they’re going to put your equipment out of service (for PMs, overhauls, etc.). In either case, production (your day) is interrupted.  

Maintenance is like doctors, always present at catastrophes. They are not the root cause, but are likely to experience the patient’s grief. Or they are like your car mechanic. When you see them, you hope nothing happens. And if it does, you don’t like it.

On the other hand, they can be the hero. When their efforts, sometimes seemingly Herculean, pull production’s “bacon out of the fire”, maintenance basks in the warm glow of operation’s gratitude.

Add to that, many maintenance craftsmen and women have an interest in their trade that goes deeper than what we’ve seen in other functions, such as operations or production control. You’ll find that many have leisure time interests that reflect their company skill sets, such as auto restoration, antique television restoration, and wrought iron sculpting, to name a few.

The Senior Employees

Maintenance is the senior group in the plant. They may have started as an operator, running the equipment. They then worked their way into maintenance, securing the best hourly pay in the plant.  They may have had to take courses in their trade. And often they’ve had to achieve certification in their skills to qualify for their job, not something one sees in the other functions. They have a personal history with the plant and a worldview more mature than others in the plant.

This creates a unique sub-culture more akin to engineering than operations within the overall corporate culture. They are pragmatic. You will not impress them with jargon-laden presentations. What you propose has to make sense. They will be impressed by your entering their environment during their work hours to demonstrate rather than conducting a lecture during the day shift.

They will test what you propose. They will have many good ideas about how things can work better. They want to help. And they have long memories. Once they buy into something, they are committed to it permanently.

Case Study

This has created some of our most rewarding interactions with client teams and maintenance teams. In one case, we were working with PMs in an automotive plant outside of Dallas.

The receiving docks were highly automated and heavily utilized. Tractor-trailers would back into the dock and connect their roof tracks to the overhead tracks leading to the production lines. The parts they were delivering (car seats, for example) were hung by rollers on the roof tracks in the trailer. At the flip of a switch, the seats would roll along the roof tracks, to the overheads, and directly into the assembly line, with the overhead tracks guiding seats onto specific car chassis.

PMs had been historically performed on the weekends because the docks were in constant use, feeding the assembly lines. However, that was costly for the plant, as it required working overtime during the weekend when the assembly lines were down. And it was inconvenient for the maintenance crafts, taking time away from their weekends. Maintenance crafts were particularly frustrated since they’d proposed for years that it could be done differently, during the lunch breaks scheduled for dock workers.

Management felt it couldn’t be done. They didn’t feel that it was physically possible nor did they trust that maintenance could stick to a schedule so closely. They would run over the break times and shut down the assembly line.

We were brought in to train maintenance planners and schedulers. We formed a team of craftspeople and operators to inspect the docks. The craftsmen worked directly with the operators, reviewing PM durations and dock shutdown and startup procedures. With no technical guidance from our facilitators, the crafts worked out what to do and how they could fit PMs into the lunch breaks. They developed the necessary communications to make it work and a Service Level Agreement with the operators to avoid interrupting assembly schedules.

Conclusion

The plant saved money, doing everything on straight time. The crafts got their weekends back. All because of the unique orientation of the maintenance department: oriented to help and big-time problem solvers. When they understood the benefits to be gained, they found how to make it work. The key is to be straightforward in what you say and deliver on any promises.