Handling the Maintenance Crunch

Even with the best people and best program, a maintenance department can find itself overwhelmed. Someone calls in sick, several unexpected failures occur at seemingly the same time, you’ve got power quality problems and someone drops the only power analyzer you have just as a lift truck zips past, or there’s a political situation that requires a key person to be in a meeting at the same time that person is badly needed on the floor.

Several tempting “solutions” present themselves:

• Increase your pace to a frantic level (or, if you are a supervisor, try to get subordinates to do that). Problem: Your pace will exceed your ability to work safely, effectively, and efficiently.
• Skip some of the “less necessary” steps in preventive maintenance procedures so you can help with the current crisis (or, as a supervisor, instruct subordinates to do that). Problem: Creating downtime time-bombs in response to downtime problems makes more problems to deal with.
• Run, don’t walk, from one hotspot to the next. Problem: Sure, you could shave 45 seconds off the trip this way. You could also seriously injure yourself or someone else.
• Dream up a way of blaming an operator or two for causing at least one of the breakdowns. Problem: This not only creates hard feelings but also defeats the idea of taking ownership and being the one who solves the problem. Also, a person who does this appears to be less competent and less reliable.
• Barge into the plant engineer’s office to demand more resources. Problem: The plant engineer is well aware of what resources you need, have, and do not have. This waste of time that could be spent fixing the problem will never get you more resources.
• For each repair, do the minimum to get the equipment running again. Make a note to come back later when things have cooled down so you can do a proper repair job (good luck getting the downtime then). Problem: It is almost a certainty that the note will be overlooked and you won’t come back. But if you do come back, the operations people will be quite annoyed that you did not fix it the first time and now want to shut them down again.

Tips

Crunches happen. They are uncomfortable, but they will pass. Stay calm and work your way through them. Some tips to help you do that:

• Know the priorities. It’s more painful to production when their bread-and-butter line is down than when an ancillary product line is on pause. There is far less pressure on maintenance when resources are allocated to the highest-priority problems, and other people see that’s what’s going on.
• Stick with your training. In 1967, the Apollo 1 capsule went up in flames during a launch rehearsal test. It didn’t save their lives, but Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee executed their emergency procedures instead of panicking. Grissom was found still belted into the command chair. Trainers and coaches refer to this incident as an example of discipline, despite the horrible outcome. It gave them the single best hope of surviving. In a maintenance crunch, you want to stay methodical rather than start winging it.
• Keep your language positive. If you blame others or gripe about management or in any other way that generates negativity, what do you think will happen? People will associate your presence with the negative emotions they feel upon hearing you, and you could actually end up being blamed for what went wrong. Instead, express confidence and assure people (e.g., operators) that you are doing the best job you can and you have their best interests at heart.
• Collect data. As you go, take notes on what could be improved. After things calm down, those notes can be analyzed and discussed. Maybe at the time it seemed like drawing prints should have been in the drawing pocket inside the cabinet. After some discussion, it comes out that this is a bad idea due to frequent updates on the system.
• Recenter, if you must. If you’re in the thick of things and the production superintendent just yelled at you out of frustration and now you can’t think straight, what do you do? A classic technique is to take a deep breath, let it out slowly, then count to three (10, in really bad situations) before going back to the task. Why does this work? You give your mind something else to focus on briefly, thus breaking the tension. Another classic method is to whistle a tune; it works for the same reason.