Maintenance and Repair Traps to Avoid — Part 2

We continue with more examples of maintenance and repair traps and how to protect your team from them.

No usage record for fall arrest equipment

How this hurts: Fall arrest equipment is damaged every time it’s subjected to the forces involved in arresting a fall. These add up; at some point, you must assume the equipment can’t take another incident. You want that point to occur long before it’s actually true. If you wait until it comes true, someone is likely to die.

What to do: There are published tables of when to replace fall arrest equipment. The recommendations are based on both usage history and the age of the equipment. Establish a system for tracking both, and replacing the equipment per the recommendations.

Equipment, parts, and supplies sit out when not in use

How this hurts: When sitting out, these items are not protected from physical damage, contamination, or theft. And when someone checks a particular drawer or other storage location and sees the item they want isn’t there, they should not have to hunt all over the place looking for it. Arguably the worst effect is the clutter created by this practice sends a message of unprofessionalism to everybody.

What to do: After cleaning and inspecting (as appropriate) equipment, parts, and supplies when you are done with them, put them away. If something is damaged and unserviceable, report it. If replenishing or replacement is needed, report it.

Work is assigned without generating a work order

How this hurts: If the work is not captured by the CMMS, all of your maintenance reports that include information about downtime and labor hours will be wrong.

What to do: It takes time to write a work order. When equipment is down and a repair is needed, waiting for paperwork can be costly. The solution is for the work analyst or supervisor to generate a work order while the repair is being made. The repair tech can then enter data and notes that the CMMS can capture.

Maintenance procedures are overly detailed

How this hurts: Almost nobody will read them. Of those who do read them, understanding is unlikely at best.

What to do: A qualified person already knows how to do that job. An unqualified person won’t be assigned the job, so doesn’t need a procedure that tells them how to do it. The procedure should serve as an outline and be a means by which the person doing the work can enter data (e.g., voltage level, contact resistance, vibration level) that are needed for input to the CMMS.

Eliminate adverbs and adjectives, unless necessary for identification (e.g., the red terminal). Use a verb-noun style (e.g., measure contact resistance), a noun-field style (e.g., Contact resistance = [numerical field]) or something else that is short.

Only certain people are sent to training

How this hurts: If only the senior people go to training, this is demotivating for those less senior and deprives them of the career development they need. If only the junior people get training, this marginalizes the middle and senior people. Sending only managers to training when they are not the ones doing the work and, thus, not the ones with application questions simply does not make sense.

Does it make sense to send managers to technical training along with workers if you believe those managers need to understand the work at the detail level? The questions behind this question are why are those managers not managing the work? Why are they indicating they don’t trust the workers will gain from the training an understanding of how to do it? This is a misallocation of resources.

What to do: Send people to training that is appropriate for their job function and level of experience. Understand that you are allocating a limited resource (the training budget) among a collection of individuals who have different roles. If you pay for a manager to take a three-day course on motor maintenance, three days of that person’s budget allocation do not go toward making that person a better manager.