A maintenance management expert is one option when you decide to perform a reliability and maintenance assessment of your maintenance organization. In this video and article, Torbjorn Idhammar is going to detail the pros of hiring an objective expert to conduct your maintenance assessment.
Watch video 1 of this 2-part series
Imagine you are walking the floor of your plant, gathering information for a Maintenance Assessment. You ask the front line, “Hey, how is planning and scheduling going, are jobs being planned before scheduling?” The answer will most likely be yes – but how do you know for sure?
You need to go into more detail. Look around the plant to see that parts and tools are ready to go and labeled with Work Order numbers, etc. in the staging areas. Do a detailed review of daily and weekly schedules to check for compliance. Check to see how much of the scheduled jobs were actually planned. This is already a lot of work, and it isn’t even the end of it!
Because of all the work, it is easy to get overwhelmed and for managers to just start trying new programs instead of keeping what is already in place with the plant. This can lead to new initiatives starting every other year or so but never actually leading to improvement. You can become stagnant this way – and it can be quite a headache. It is important to determine best practices and to develop an assessment process that is done the same way year after year.
So, who in the plant possibly has the time to investigate what is going on in the organization and gather the information about current maintenance practices to come up with this detailed process?
At IDCON we are of course biased about this – but we believe that the best way to do a Maintenance Assessment is by working with a third party. It is very difficult to focus on a detailed assessment when you have so many other responsibilities demanding your attention throughout the day.
What to look for in a maintenance management expert
When you are choosing this third party, it is important to make sure that they can see your organization objectively and not be focused on selling you some engineering service or a fancy new computer system. It must be clear that they won’t be afraid to speak their mind while taking your organization’s specific situation into consideration.
At IDCON, not only do we provide maintenance consulting as described above, but we can also train you to become a Certified Maintenance Assessor to successfully perform Maintenance Assessments. The basics are that you are assigned an experienced IDCON trainer, go through some classroom training, perform an assessment alongside the trainer, and then lead an assessment yourself. After a successful evaluation, you then become an IDCON Certified Maintenance Assessor. We can also provide Preventive Maintenance Training for your crew.
