I have had the good fortune of seeing various maintenance organizations at different stages of effectiveness. This includes the many that are purely reactive, the few that are proactive, and the mass on the continuum that runs between the extremes.

 

From this experience, I've observed that maintenance departments tend to be like water in that they all tend to flow toward the lowest level of effectiveness—purely reactive. I'm not referring to a short-term focus or the need to react to crises or specific situations. Instead, I'm talking about the long-term movement of most maintenance departments over the years, particularly as they transition from manager to manager, to become less and less effective.

 

This is not to denigrate any maintenance professional. Many effective maintenance departments keep their sites running cost-effectively and give their businesses a strategic advantage through the reliability and cost advantage they supply. However, I've also encountered several maintenance organizations that are currently poor performers, which, in the past, have been good or even great. In these programs, you often stumble upon the fossils of good practices and methods that have been abandoned.

 

No one seems to understand why the department changed, but those who were in maintenance when the change occurred know it happened. Interestingly enough, process personnel who were around at the same time rarely seem to realize that a change has occurred. This slide to reactive maintenance is not unique to a site or industry. Still, it is the norm, like water constantly flowing to the lowest level.

A number of contributing factors exacerbate this continuous downward pressure on maintenance performance, along with several significant causes. I'm sure if you put a group of maintenance professionals together, they could spend hours discussing their personal experiences with each other.

 

Nevertheless, you must realize that these factors were also present when the maintenance departments peaked, so why the downward trend? I wish I could give scientific evidence to support this, but to this point, I've only been able to gather anecdotal evidence, make personal observations, and gather data from incomplete and often flawed memories of those whose careers have spanned the rise and fall of specific departments.

 

From this arguable database, the most significant contributor to a maintenance department's ultimate success is the department manager. Maintenance managers have a more significant effect on their departments than production managers or even plant managers have on their groups. Before the maintenance managers begin to pat themselves on the back, they should also realize that the ultimate failure of a maintenance department is most significantly due to the same cause.

 

It's not just a strong personality that is needed at the maintenance helm, because the leadership of most departments already meets this requirement. Exceptional leaders must be grounded in the maintenance philosophies and understand how they interact. They must know that transitioning from reactive to proactive maintenance is a journey in which all levels must be traversed.

 

They also need to realize that maintenance mindsets and strategies are different and sometimes require the exact opposite reaction. They must know the value of various practices and methods to correctly follow a long-term strategy while making the necessary tradeoffs to manage the day-to-day operations. In addition, they must fight the tendency of their own people and maybe even themselves when they revel in the excitement of being the hero who got the broken line running again.

 

This is where the crux of the problem occurs. Understanding maintenance is not nearly as common as many people think. It is not the same as having a mechanical aptitude or knowing how to fix things. There are people who understand maintenance philosophies well and know how to implement them, but they are a minority. In most cases, their knowledge has been gleaned from a varied collection of sources, such as trade publications, seminars, discussions with other professionals, industry conferences, and information from consultants.

 

Many individuals have gathered the required knowledge this way, and it is not an impossible task. However, it is also not an obvious or well-traveled path. Instead, it is a haphazard way to acquire the necessary knowledge. There is even an element of luck as to whether a person will be exposed to all the correct concepts to develop a workable understanding.

 

This means that it not only takes intelligence and curiosity to become a talented maintenance manager who can create and maintain an excellent department, but it also takes a degree of luck to be exposed to the right information. Not nearly enough people have been able to travel this path and learn the maintenance management craft compared to the number of people needed in the field.

In many ways, the maintenance department at most sites is equivalent to a third-party contractor. Maintenance is treated differently than the production group, and its goals are often measured differently.

 

In any site-management meeting, those with maintenance experience are usually outnumbered 10-to-1 or more by those with only production experience, which means that the deck is stacked against maintenance. What's worrisome about this situation is that the production group usually makes the hiring decision for the maintenance leader even though production does not understand maintenance.

 

In the worst cases, production believes that anyone with an engineering degree can run maintenance or that anyone who is well-spoken and knows how to fix a pump can do the job. Although many maintenance professionals may think the same way, I don't believe the skill set needed to be a good maintenance manager can be listed so succinctly.

 

This is the primary reason a well-functioning maintenance department is difficult to maintain. When managers with the intelligence and knowledge to grow an exceptional department move on, they will most likely be replaced by someone who does not have the same understanding.

 

In most cases, it doesn't matter if the replacement comes from inside or outside the department. The replacement may be intelligent and capable, but they just won't have the necessary knowledge. At this point, the slide toward reactive maintenance begins, and once it starts, it appears to pick up momentum as it moves along. One thing I'm sure of is that reactive maintenance feeds off of and perpetuates itself.

 

Maintenance managers who can make their department a strategic advantage to the company instead of just the largest variable cost center must constantly work to learn their craft. Many misinterpret "learning the craft" as meaning they understand the equipment.

 

While equipment knowledge is important, it is not as critical as understanding other things, such as what a good preventive maintenance program is and how to keep it evergreen, how to set up a computerized maintenance management system, how to develop the department so it is not dependent on the specific knowledge of individuals, how predictive technologies interact and when they are worth implementing, the differences between the maintenance philosophies, the importance of proper training, and how the goals of the department are not the same as the goals of the repairman.

 

What follows is not an exhaustive list of the pressures that push a maintenance department toward becoming reactive but rather the items that have been factors in the falls that I have witnessed. They are in no particular order.

 

It's true that production is king, but this shouldn't be interpreted as meaning that this group always gets its way. Too often, production puts short-term expediency in front of long-term success. The inability to stop production at a controlled time or manner leads to more costly, longer-duration, and often less effective repairs, which ultimately cost production output much more. 

            

If a maintenance department could change in one day from being completely reactive to doing everything correctly, it would still take years for the results to become completely evident. Many initiating events for failures have already occurred, and the results will pop up for a while. This makes people doubt the effectiveness of a positive course change and revert to old, familiar methods.

 

A primary push toward purely reactive maintenance comes from the people who become maintenance technicians. They usually choose their field because they have worked with their hands and are good at fixing things. There's the rub. They are good at fixing things, so they became maintenance workers.

 

There is a belief that because they developed their skills by fixing things, this is what maintenance people do – they fix things. Unfortunately, while the ability to fix things is an essential competency in maintenance, it should never be the primary focus.

 

There is a different reward system for maintenance than for the production or process group. A production manager who keeps production running smoothly is viewed as doing a good job. A maintenance manager who keeps the plant running smoothly and avoids major problems is seen as having fewer difficult challenges to face.

 

Why wouldn't someone want to be the white knight in a world like this? Consider a political corollary. You get more positive notice for building a new bridge than maintaining an existing one, even though maintaining the old bridge would cost far less.

 

This has become a much bigger problem over the last 25 years. People who understand equipment and can maintain it are not as available as they once were. The majority of maintenance people must be trained, and much of this is accomplished through on-the-job learning. Unfortunately, much of this learning is not of the highest quality or current, leading to a shorter mean time between failures and a more reactive philosophy.

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