One of the most common remarks I get from people I teach, is they often tell me that if we follow what you are teaching and our equipment's reliability improve then we aint working on overtime no more, and if our line definitely improves then they can cut manpower resources on maintenance and I might loose my job.

How would you address this situation ? Kindly be in my shoes when you answer this post, as I come from a third world country where unemployment is a big problem. Perhaps in other countries such as yours you can get a job easily, so this is not often an issue to the maintenance people afterall.

Appreciate any feedback here

Rolly,

I work consistently in the international arena and understand exactly what you mean.

My answer would be that they are right. Efficiency improvements often mean less people, regardless of what we would like to do this is often the end result.

But, there will always be work for the best people. Always.

The way I see things, you improve now and some people get moved on. Or you don't and everybody gets moved on when the company decides to outsource, downsize, close the doors or whatever.

Most large companies always look for manpower reductions, and they will get them by controlled methods or by force generally. Uncomfortable truths.

I generally take the approach; a better product at a cheaper price means expansion, better job, higher pay and take over the companies that whin and make excuses or employees that throw a monkeywrench into the works - those will be the one's looking for a job.

Labor is one of our cheapest commodities and greatest assets but must be managed.

Rolly,
Some years ago, I made some presentations on RCM implementation to about 30 peaople on an offshore platform. It was in two parts, on two days. In the first part I explained the RCM process, how it works, its benefits, the need for cooperative effort etc. On the next day, I opened the session by asking whether they thought my job was to get rid of their job.
Stunned silence was followed by a few affirmative nods. After a long pause, I said "You know, you are quite right" and paused again, to hear many sharp intakes of breath. Then I said "But you are also wrong". Then I told them that my job was to make sure that they returned to their homes after this tour of duty with their limbs intact, in good health.
I do believe that the primary role of tools like RCM is to improve Safety, by improving reliability. But when we improve reliability, many other things happen as well. Quality, uptime and maintenance costs also improve almost automatically. Quality is associated with pride; who does not want to be seen as a high quality worker making high quality products? Pride also goes with uptime; who wants breakdowns on his shift? Thus reliability improvements boost morale and pride; any objections to that?
Finally maintenance costs; fewer failures means fewer spares and consumables, fewer vendor visits. Any objection to that? Aha, you say, but it means less maintainers as well. True, but is it better to have more workers in an unsafe plant or fewer workers who can be reasonably sure they are in a safe plant? Who votes to get injured? Or to damage the environment? Would you like the odd fire or two (or many?)
Companies can reduce manpower arbitarily or after analysis and action to improve reliability successfully. I asked them whether they prefer that work volume is reduced AND THEN manpower reduced or if they are willing to wait for the slash and burn manpower cuts while keeping the old work volume, so theat those left behind have to work even harder.
Later, some of the attendees met me one-to-one during my walkabouts in the Platform and thanked me for my open explanation. they had never heard anybody admit to something they 'knew' all along. But for the first time they heard a reasoning that was acceptable to them. Yes, they would rather work in a safe plant, even if some of them would lose their jobs.
Rolly, I too have worked in poor countries where jobs matter a lot. Such reductions can be handled sesitively and sensibly. I and my two co-authors have discussed these aspects at some length in our forthcoming book "100 Years of Maintenance; Practical Lessons from Three Lifetimes" - Ind. Press, June 2007.

Vee,
Good post. I dont personally use the safety line but I agree it is vitally important to put things in honest perspective.
I tend to offer people the idea that working overtime often means that an organisation is reactive and hence the workers are "fire fighters". This is a difficult environment when one is trying to use knowledge and get job satisfaction. Workers in plants that are well organised and planned seem to have more time to work on machinery improvements and use their skills. They seem to enjoy work much better than the group that is under continual pressure.
I have never completed an assignment in maintenance where people have lost their job as a result. As organisations move to a more planned environment, there is always less "maintenance" to do (all other things being equal).
There are two responses I give if I need to. First is that most maintenance departments do not have sufficient resources to do what is require now, so increases in productivity will only help getting the required job done... and
Secondly, the "tool time" work may be a maintenance function, but it is not a reliability function hence reliabilty jobs will be created. One company we worked for created five positions as Reliability Technicians from the trades people. This was from a group of around 30 people.
Having said all that, we can never predict what is around the corner, and unfortunately, new management can change the rules quickly - so we can never promise anything.
Being honest about all these things is the only way to go as far as I am concerned and seems to be the common thread behind this topic.

Regards
Steve

Steve,
Thanks, I agree with your comment below. We must get the 'fun' element back into the workplace.

quote:

Workers in plants that are well organised and planned seem to have more time to work on machinery improvements and use their skills. They seem to enjoy work much better than the group that is under continual pressure.

OT doesn't mean something is broken. I have 2 working a lot of OT upgrading equipment. If you were understaffed OT may be necessary until you get more people. I work a normal 60+ hr week; so what does that mean - ineffecient, need more staff or greed or conservative? Many times OT is the solution and not even a problem. Getting the job done with the same number of people without the additional benefits, insurance and retirement - reality.

Typically most of the maintenance craftspeople are deployed to do reactive work during overtime, as they always complain that maintenance is always underpaid and overworked. But typically the best positions an industry will always belong to the maintenance function. Maintenance is so granduer in nature and most plants and industries only try to limit their strategies and organizations on maintenance on repair mode, some Preventive Maintenance and a few occasional Predictive Maintenance .

My belief is that when we try to improve reliability more doors and opportunities will open on the maintenance organization that are much more relevant than being on the repair organization. How many plants have full time people on Spareparts Management, Lubrication, Tribology Group, Failure Analysis Group, Total Contamination Control Group, Improvement Groups, technical training group, In-house fractography, weibull people, CMMS group and lists goes on and on for the best titles in the maintenance arena, but all an industry can think of as of the moment is placing their people on the repair side of maintenance.

I tell my people that I teach that no management in the right state of mind will expel or fire out a person who have done wonders in their plant, he knows that this person is of great value to their industry and maybe if a reduction in manpower from the maintenance function arises, they will have to get it mostly on the reactive side of the maintenance group which are the repair people who dont have the time to improve.

Having an overtime means a few bucks in your pocket but also having less quality time with your love once and family, how many times do you go home at night seeing your children sleeping instead of joining you for supper. Overtime means cost to the industry, but as reliability starts to improve, this means less overtime in the long run making your industry more fierce and competetive and this makes an industry a better chance to survive. We have a better choice to make and I hope that we do choose the correct path to undertake.

My Warm Regards,

Rolly Angeles
Teacher

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Rolly12,

Presentation1.ppt (38 Kb, 37 downloads)

If I remember correctly, overtime should be between 8 to 20%, higher during shutdown. So it should not be above or below this range. Above 20% is excessive or understaffed etc. Below 8%, maybe overstaff etc.

On what jobs can overtime be taken? On priority 1 & 2 jobs with high consequences to HSE and/or production. Other routine CM jobs should be prioritized and scheduled. Planning and scheduling principles (as per Doc Palmer) should be applied to control overtime.

Permission to overtime should be requested and approved to know the justifications for overtime. This should be the opportunity to control overtime. Other depts should have the same procedure for controlling overtime, not only maintenance.

In short, the overtime should be genuine.

Josh,

quote:

Below 8%, maybe overstaff etc.

Where do you get these numbers? There are many ways to lower the O/T levels, and I have known efficiently run plants with tight manning run at 5% or less. It has a lot to do with the quality of planning and scheduling, use of operators for minor maintenance, pride in work (and hence quality), CMMS that is helpful and friendly, and good team work between Ops and Maint. Note that soft issues are as important as hard ones. In my exp[erience. companies that go after high reliability first are more successful than those who run just after 'wrench-time'.

Those were some internal figures to start with. As you said, soft issues need to be addressed before can reach 5% or less. This excellent level is tough to achieve but not impossible.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Josh,

During my last work, I used to go home everyday at around 9:00pm every night to work on my trainings and it was overtime. I know that not all overtime are reactive, perhaps we have some improvement projects which require hours to undertake, but for the case of this thread, I would like to speak about overtime being performed on a reactive mode.

My Warm Regards,

Rolly Angeles

quote:

I have never completed an assignment in maintenance where people have lost their job as a result.

I think this is quite an admission to make Steve. I appreciate how sensitive this can be but surely a manager's role should be to reduce costs? If this is so then reductions in headcount must be considered as an option. This is unavoidable when effective mechanisms have been put in place to ensure that people work more efficiently.

Let's face it, that's often why senior management provide the budget to implement CMMS and employ consultants in the first place. Sure they want to see their maintenance department reducing downtime and working more efficiently but I would contend that most of them see the bottom line as a reduction in maintenance spending and probably head count.

I don't have the solution to this and it is always difficult because people are not stupid. They know when the implementation of new practices is likely to affect headcount because it is generally fairly obvious. They do talk amongst themselves you know.

In my last role as an employee I had to manage just such a situation. I am based in the West of Scotland where people traditionally don't like to be patronised. I always find the best approach is to come clean ... tell them exactly what is happening. Don't lie to them or even try to be economic with the truth. they will know what is going on anyway.

I should say that when we got involved in this it was in a situation where the company was already in trouble and the maintenance personnel already knew that jobs were likely to be lost so it did make it a bit easier.

Bryan,
You say,

quote:

but surely a manager's role should be to reduce costs?

I think a manager's role is to minimize risks to the organizations viability and profitability. One way is to reduce costs, but often a better way is to increase the revenue stream, and companies that thrive seem to do this all the time.
Even within the limited set called maintenance, costs relate not just to labour, but spares, logistic support, consum,ables, vendor support etc. Doing e.g. RCM will eliminate a fair chunk of work we do today, so yes, that will cut costs in all these areas. Coming to labour costs alone, most companies contract out a lot of work - because of shortage of in-house resources or skills. One answer may be to upskill the 'surplus' staff and deploy them as in-house contractors.
Sensitive handling is far superior to short trem 'quick-wins'; it is only managers who cannot see beyond the tip of their nose who go for immediate cost-cutting rather than taking a long term view.

Bryan,

Most Managers

Most managers will reduce cost at the expense of sacrificing reliability

Few Managers

Few managers will improve reliability since they know that once reliability starts to improve then cost will definitely go down.

Now which is the right path to choose ? We know what it is yet most managers will choose the other path.

Most managers know that reducing cost is the right thing to do. I try to tell the people I teach that this is the wrong thing to do, if we are dead serious in reducing cost then managers should deal with the life cycle cost of the entire equipment.

My warm regards,


Rolly Angeles
Teacher

There are options to deal with labor costs. If after some improvements in efficiency, due to RCM or any other technique/system, the crew size seems larger than needed the following can be considered:
* May Maintenance use these resources to tackle other meaningful functions/activities to further improve profitability?
* can any services currently contracted outside be assigned the the crew and still be quality/economically correct?
* are the excess of human resources ussable at other section of the company: operations? utilities? project engineering? technical services? how much training be required?
* and yes, early retirement is still an option.

Vee/Rolly,

quote:

Most managers will reduce cost at the expense of sacrificing reliability

In my message you can take it as a given that decisions would not be based on any safety or reliability compromise.

I assumed that the original question was related to situations where improvements in maintenance performance led to a situation where Maintenance workload was no longer => available maintenance manppower. In this situation it is quite normal that overtime or headcount is reduced.

It's fine talking about ideal situations where the company can afford to redeploy or offer their surplus employees sub contractor's roles but this seldom happens in the real world.

quote:

Kindly be in my shoes when you answer this post, as I come from a third world country where unemployment is a big problem. Perhaps in other countries such as yours you can get a job easily, so this is not often an issue to the maintenance people afterall.

Rolly, as I said earlier, I am based in the West of Scotland, where the workforce was exploited for a couple of centuries. This led to the development of strong left wing political and Trade Union organisations. The death of shipbuilding and heavy industry in this region left many of the people who were involved in the traditional engineering industries out of work. It also ensured that TU organisations were greatly weakened. This may not be the third world but good jobs are still hard to come by.

Incidentally I am 58 years of age and I have worked all my life in shipbuilding, heavy industry and manufacturing in this area. I have, as they say in my vernacular, "had a good kick at the ball". I can recall times when the workforce and TUs were so strong that they could insist that anyone who was employed in some companies was guaranteed two nights and a Saturday morning overtime shift, whether or not this was required.

Changed days ...

IN reality, maintenance people do not lose jobs over maintenance strategies, initiatives or projects. Many projects are justified saying that there is a reduction in manpower required. However, I have never heard of a case where people were let go due to predictive maintenance, lean, RCM, proactive maintenance, etc.

While the project is justified by saying there will be less manpower required, for maintenance there is always more work, and usually it's more valuable work, that needs to be done, and should have been done. It's just there were no resources to do that work.

It may be true that these people who fear for there jobs will experience a change in the type of work they do.

However, no one is going to save their jobs by choosing to be inefficient and unreliable. The work will go away to a newer plant with less problems, or to another country that has lower costs, for now anyway, or because the cost of the product the company produces is too high another product will be developed that takes its place.

Smart management organizations should assure the workers that no one will in maintenance will lose jobs due to gaining effiiciences and higher reliability and should be offering education and training for maintenance workers to enhance their skills to take on higher level tasks.

The above does not necessarily apply to production workers because they can be automated away in relatively short periods of time. This is due in large part because they lack upper level, upper value skills.

The more efficient world economy that enables us to ship products all over the world and seek out the most efficient producers has dictated this.

The auto industry in the US is a prime example of this. Unionized work forces resisted work rule changes for years that would have made manufacturing more efficient and possibly lowered prices so that it would not be so attractive for other auto companies to compete in the USA.

So, the unionized autoworkers have cost themselves hundreds of thousands of jobs just over the past 5 years and even more over 25 years.

To be fair, I don't know that the management of the US auto companies would have made better decisions if they had the opportunity. They've made huge mistakes as well and would probably taken higher profits, paid themselves bigger salaries, or paid more dividends to shareholders.

At any rate, they're all losers now, and the winners are Toyota, Honda, etc with their efficient manufacturing systems.

Oh well, my rant for the month!

Joe,
Spot on Joe. Luddites and managers with very short sight are the real problems. The sooner people recognize that the market is now truly global, the better off they will be.
The western world is soon going to face a severe shortage of skilled people as well as engineering graduates. Letting good people go in this scenario is really short sighted, usually done by managers with a cost-focused mentality instead of, as Steven Covey would say, a P + PC mentalility. The goose that lays the golden egg must be nurtured, not slaughtered!

We are veering away from the issue here.

quote:

IN reality, maintenance people do not lose jobs over maintenance strategies, initiatives or projects.

This was Rolly's thread and his question was about the situation at his plant. He asked the question in the context that people could lose jobs. We must assume that he knows more about this than us so answers should be based on the situation he defined. You have moved the goalposts and responded to a different situation.

However I must disagree with you. In reality people may not often lose jobs because of the above but clearly it does happen. I have seen it and I am sure many others will have too.

Vee, I respect your opinion but in this case it is based on an ideal world that does not really exist. Most managers nowadays must be cost focussed otherwise they will be out of a job. Whether you like it or not the real world is all about financial targets and performance.

And I repeat, Rolly's question is about how to address his situation. I may be wrong but telling him how things should be in an ideal world is probably not much help.