In the high-pressure environment of unscheduled repairs, both the maintenance department in general and maintenance techs, in particular, can be hampered by additional burdens. Here are some maintenance and repair traps and how to protect your team from them.

Helicoptering managers

What happens: In plants with toxic cultures, managers feel a need to appear to be “concerned” when critical equipment is down. Instead of staying in their offices doing their jobs, they hover over the maintenance techs.

How this hurts: Nobody can work effectively with someone looking over their shoulder or frequently asking unhelpful questions. It’s one thing if a senior tech is helping a junior tech by watching the work and coaching. It’s quite another when someone who doesn’t know a DMM from a screwdriver is telling you how to do the job.

What to do: Place the supervisor between those managers and the workers. All questions must be directed to the supervisor and managers must refrain from going into the affected area. Don’t be afraid to enforce the message; this type of manager costs the company money simply to polish his or her image to other managers.

At an appliance plant near Nashville, the situation came to a head when managers from many departments formed a wall around the repair techs. At that point, the supervisor ordered them to pack up their tools and leave until the managers agreed to go back to their offices.

Bad-faith downtime agreements

What happens: A particular line is close to falling too far behind to get today’s orders out. The production manager asks if a temporary fix can be made to save an hour rather than repairing it correctly. For example, a motor had a “soft foot” and loosening a bolt ended the wild vibration problem. But it still vibrates and should undergo alignment. When the techs return the next day to perform the alignment, they are told no.

The production manager is gambling that the next breakdown happens on one of the other two shifts. He has a 100% chance of downtime if you properly repair the equipment, but only a 33% chance of downtime if you don’t.

How this hurts: Unscheduled shutdowns are costly. When emergency repairs are treated like permanent repairs, the next failure is blamed on the maintenance department and the company takes a financial hit.

What to do: One approach is to get the agreement in writing; have forms already created in the CMMS for this purpose. On the form, state that reneging on the agreement will be immediately reported to the plant manager along with the projected costs of a preventable failure. But if a maintenance manager or even the plant engineer can talk one-on-one with each production manager or discuss this at a group meeting, you can get buy-in and not have to use coercion or other measures.

Operators or floor supervisors directing repair technicians

What happens: A technician is just about done with an assigned repair when an operator complains, “My machine is down and I need you to fix it.” The tech, trying to keep a good relationship with production, follows the operator to the machine and gets to work on it.

Why this hurts: Established priorities are violated; this tech is now tied up perhaps on a repair that can wait and is not available for one that needs to happen on higher-priority equipment.

What to do: If all techs are equipped with radios, then any tech approached this way can call in the problem to report it. Then the dispatcher (usually a crew leader, work analyst, or shift supervisor) can decide where in the queue to put the repair and when to send someone to respond.

If techs are not equipped with radios, any tech approached this way must be trained to politely instruct the operator on how to call in the repair request. Techs need to make it clear they don’t have the authority to decide which repair do next because they can’t see what jobs need to be done or what resources are available for doing them.