Stop trying to fix everything
As maintenance practitioners we often do our utmost best to try and prevent as many failures as possible. Afterall, failures create downtime… And downtime results in big profit losses for the organisation. But sometimes, our fear of failures leads us to doing way more Preventive Maintenance tasks than necessary… resulting in highly inefficient and expensive […]
The 5 Types of Preventative Maintenance
At a high level, all maintenance is either preventive maintenance or corrective maintenance. As a maintenance practitioner, you need to match the right type of maintenance with the characteristics of the failure mode you’re dealing with. And you need to pick the type of maintenance that suits your objectives. Keep in mind that there is […]
Information Overload in Maintenance Training
We often need to consume plenty of complex data and information in a short amount of time. But sometimes, this amount of information can get overwhelming. This is when you start experiencing Information Overload. Information overload describes the difficulty to learn, understand, and make decisions due to the excessive amount of information available to a person […]
Why should we bother with Maintenance Scheduling
“Why should we bother with scheduling?” “Is planning the job not enough?” “How is scheduling going to increase our productivity?” Plenty of my clients and students have asked me these questions. So, here’s the bitter truth: Even if you had world-class planning… It won’t be enough to achieve high productivity. Because planning alone will only […]
5 steps to manage maintenance backlogs
A lot of people have very fixed ideas about maintenance backlog. Some people see backlog as any work that was due in the past. Others also include work that is rescheduled for the future (which is technically called forelog). But I like to make things as simple as possible. In my simple view, backlog is […]
5 Common mistakes in Maintenance Planning
Maintenance planning is one of the key elements of creating a highly effective and reliable plant. Without it, you’ll find yourself in a reactive maintenance environment where your crew constantly runs from one emergency to the next. When you implement maintenance planning, it’s okay to make mistakes. After all, planning is a process that demands […]
The one KPI every maintenance planner should be using
If you want to know how good your maintenance performance is, then you need to look at maintenance Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Maintenance KPIs are performance measures that guide your organisation towards achieving your maintenance objectives. But with the many KPIs that we have in the industry, it might get confusing. That’s why you need […]
How to deal with Emergency Maintenance
Emergency maintenance is a pain to deal with. It’s the kind of work that, when identified, is so urgent that it must be done immediately, even though it’s not part of your frozen schedule. And often it is 3 to 5 times more expensive than properly planned work. That’s why we do our best to […]
Overtime is E.V.I.L
Most technicians see overtime as a good thing. They get more pay. They get more time to finish the job. And they get to show how diligent they are at work. The downside is the stress of working more hours. But to some people, that stress is worth the extra pay. I get it. I’ve had my […]
Maintenance vs. Production
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room… If you’re a maintenance professional, I’m sure you’ve felt the tense atmosphere between maintenance and operations. When I speak to maintenance teams, these are some of the common complaints about their Operations colleagues… Now, when I speak to the Operations team and hear what they say about […]
