The typical maintenance department mission is to keep production equipment running at as near its maximum uptime as possible. But many maintenance departments inadvertently maintain some things that stop them from reaching this goal. How many can you identify from the list that follows? How many others can you think of?
• Counterproductive practices. These may be outdated or simply wrong. Are you doing the right things, or just doing things because you’ve always done them (that way)?
• Outdated test equipment. At some point, the cost-savings of not upgrading test equipment is greatly outweighed by the cost of downtime that the right test equipment could have helped you prevent.
• Unsafe attitudes. How do you respond when you see a coworker engaging in unsafe behavior? What does this attitude say about technical work quality?
• Negativity. Yes, operators cause problems. But they are your customers. Give them a positive, supportive attitude. They will return this through closer attention to what they are doing.
• Failure-prone production equipment. Simply fixing what keeps breaking means you are maintaining downtime instead of maintaining uptime. Modify, replace, or solve the root cause.
