24/7 Maintenance Coverage, Zero Traction

I was new to the factory.  The day I showed up I found out the plant was in danger of being closed. 

Division published a plan for "plant consolidation"... and we were the bottom performer.

They didn't mention that in the interview.

My department had four maintenance techs. One on each shift. 24/7 coverage.  And they were good.  They knew their trades.

We always had someone there for emergencies, but we never had enough people there to compete with emergencies. 

Every scheduled downtime, the same thing happened: the floor would pull somebody away to chase a breakdown, and the corrective work we'd planned for that day got bumped.

We had a decent parts budget. We just couldn't spend it. Parts sat on the shelf because there was never enough labor in the building during scheduled downtime to get them on the machine.

So I made a call nobody liked: I pulled all four techs to 5-day, day shift. And we covered nights and weekends with a rotating call-in schedule.

Everyone hated it.

The call-in compensation was good enough to get them to deal with it, but nothing could make them like it.  

It was rough. We lost a tech almost every single day-shift for the first couple months because he was in late the night before on calls.  

I was paying labor I wasn't getting because they got that second day off if they were in too late.

And the crew was tired and mad at me. I second-guessed a lot.  

But, on down-day, we started to be able to get some work done.  At first, it wasn't much. But we had lots of parts marooned on the shelf that we hadn't been able to get on the machines.  The shelf started to see movement.

And some of our biggest problems got handled.

And after a few months the call-ins started thinning out. Slowly, then faster. 

Inside of a year we'd made some real progress.  Production numbers had improved.

We swapped to the call-in schedule in January of that year.  In October of that same year we ran the whole month without a call-in.

Here's the part I want plant leaders to sit with: we made a conscious decision to get worse at reactive maintenance so we could get better at preventive maintenance.

And don't be fooled.  Corrective maintenance is preventive maintenance.  

If you're deferring corrective maintenance long term your preventive maintenance metrics are irrelevant.  

Deferred correctives will destroy your equipment's performance.

You don't turn-around a plant by staffing for coverage. You turn-around a plant by massing enough labor at your scheduled downtime to actually consume the parts budget you have. 

And you must consciously control that parts budget to buy the stuff that gives the biggest return... and get those parts on the machines as soon as they arrive.

That was a rough year.  The team had lots of conflict and hard challenges.  But we got better.

We started as the obvious choice to shutdown. 

We ended the year with an award as "Division Plant of the Year".