Five Reasons Why Maintenance Management Fails?

 

“Maintenance is a pure expense” – an old perception yet prevailed and so inculcated that the fragment of this notion is still found everywhere in the organization, where maintenance is still striving to take a reputable place in the management’s eyes by seeking different strategies and implementing collections of tactics to reduce overall maintenance costs, whereas management talks only in the language of money – neither management takes interest in the details of maintenance nor the maintenance prodigies try to bridge the gap between Maintenance and Management – thus this fissure cost organization a lot – Increased breakdowns and maintenance cost, reduced product & service quality, and increased liabilities, etc. 

Maintenance Management is a vital tool in the process of overcoming the attitude of taking maintenance as a colossal burden that doesn’t add much value to the growth of the organization. it has oodles of benefits that can earn a big profit in return, but the notion is not easy to implement – it’s frequently associated with a multitude of difficulties. This article explores the reasons for ineffective maintenance management practices in the organization – but before delving into further details maintenance managers are urged to self-evaluate their maintenance efforts owing to make them able to see through the process and understand if their maintenance efforts are aligned with the company’s objectives or not?

Maintenance Program Effectiveness Evaluation: 

This evaluation is formulated by the U.S Energy Research and Development Administration after an exhaustive study on maintenance-related matters. Enumerated below are some evaluatory points that help maintenance managers to know the areas of improvement where they are least productive and need to concentrate more. 

• The whereabouts of your workmen/technician/maintenance resources as how they usually spend most of their time? On travel, delays, at the store for material collections, etc.?
• Do you log maintenance records of all equipment installed in the facility which tells you what equipment consumes most of the maintenance cost?
• Can you pinpoint the activity that drains the maintenance budget without giving many benefits?
• Do you have proper maintenance procedures and standards in your organization? And are they being referred by the craftsmen?
• How certain are you that your craftsmen are using the right tools? And how often do they find the right tool in the store?
• Is the inventory of spare parts balanced at your organization vis-à-vis carrying cost vs anticipated downtime losses? 
• How often do you consider the maintainability factors during the design and modification process?
• Can you identify how much time your craftsmen spend in the office and at the job site?
• Do you have any maintenance plan intact in your organization? And do you see any improvement?
• Are safety practices being followed by your team?
• How often do you provide the right quality and quantity of the material to the craftsmen?

Five Reasons Why Maintenance Management Fails?:

Achieving excellent maintenance performance is not a dream – however, it does face some challenges in the pursuit of achieving world-class maintenance performance – reasons that are identified by experts are given below:

Improper Maintenance Management Model:

One prime reason that the efforts of the organizations go in vain during the implementation process of maintenance management in their facility is the missing key element of maintenance management. It is important to have all key elements of maintenance management intact owing to surpass the maintenance performance. The absence of any one element may give a hard time to manage facility maintenance, for example:

• Absence of maintenance policy or the lack of its understanding may create problems in aligning maintenance objectives with the long-term organization goal.
• Improper material management may create unnecessary delays and increases breakdown losses, etc.
• Receiving incomplete work orders after maintenance activities are performed may result in poor maintenance strategies for the future.
• Lack of preventive or predictive maintenance increases equipment breakdown, reduces equipment reliability, increases maintenance cost, product quality issues, etc.
• Planning & Scheduling are another crucial element of maintenance management which if not properly followed would create heaps of problems in managing maintenance activities.

There are other elements too that are equally important in the process of managing maintenance activities – without proper measuring indices one cannot deduce valuable results and improve maintenance performance. 

Advance Equipment & Complex Problems:

Another crucial challenge that hampers the effective implementation of maintenance management is the continuous infusion of automated equipment and its integration with existing equipment which has made maintenance issues more critical, complex, and difficult to solve. With the influx of advanced technologies, the requirement for increased knowledge of maintenance troubleshooting is inevitable – a maintenance professional needs to have a knowledge of modern technologies and the variety of issues, their effects, and consequences to detect equipment errors more proactively.  

This diversification in the maintenance problems and their underlying intricacies due to technological advancement has made it indispensable for organizations to continuously adapt to the change and revolutionize the maintenance strategies more often than before.

 Lack of Maintenance Procedures & History Record:

Lack of maintenance procedures and records is one of the important reasons why organizations really struggle to manage the maintenance department. Maintenance standards and procedures are important for organizations to maintain the consistency and quality of the product and for improving the machine’s inherent reliability. The lack of procedures creates process variation, conflict in practices, and plant instability.  

Similarly, if the history of maintenance activities is not recorded and maintained then it would be very difficult to implement suitable maintenance strategies.

Lack of Leadership Commitment:

Leadership commitment in the process of implementing maintenance management is essential because it provides the vision and resources for the continuous improvement program. If the leadership is not supportive then the organizations find it very difficult – mostly impossible to sustain growth and not fall back into the reactive culture.

Leadership commitment is the most important and foremost thing in the process of embracing sustainable reliable culture as leaders are the one who provides resources, proper tools, and training to both the operators and maintenance together as a team.

Reactive Maintenance is Applauded:

Maintenance management cannot thrive in a reactive culture where maintenance teams get rewarded after the restoration of the equipment breakdown – people get promotions and applauded for their prompt action because it’s the spectacular failure that gets a headline. In a reactive culture, maintenance activities are not managed but controlled.