The golden oldies19 October 2013

WM's in-depth survey takes the temperature of the UK's maintenance operations. Annie Gregory reports on the refusal to give in to the challenges of ageing equipment and a shrinking skills base.

You probably know the story. Joshua-the-Maintenance retires. Two weeks later his MD begs him to come back and fix a machine that has baffled everyone. There's a shock, however, when he gets Josh's bill: "What did he do that stacks up £5,001.02?" Back comes the explanation: "£1.02 for the spare part – and £5,000 for knowing which one."

As WM's 2013 survey into maintenance and asset management reveals, it's not just the old jokes that survive. Over half of the sites surveyed say their biggest challenge is sustaining ageing plant. What's more, they are struggling to maintain operator understanding of the machinery while the members of the workforce who know it inside out are often of an equivalent vintage to Josh. Maintenance succession planning, recruitment and training are big issues across UK industry.

Let's have a look at the finding in more depth. The good news is that three-quarters of the sites surveyed have a formal maintenance strategy and the majority of those (89%) link it to their overall business objectives. Those who haven't aren't necessarily refusing to smell the coffee – most of them either acknowledge they lack the expertise, the manpower or the time rather than the desire. Of course, the reason they may lack the time could be – ahem – because they haven't got a formal maintenance strategy. Thus the sore head will still keep smacking the wall.

The survey records more than one sad comment about fire-fighting being a necessary consequence of production demands. In my naivety, I thought that "we make, you fix" had been recognised as self-defeating years ago, even though it's not always easy to make the sacrifices necessary on both sides to achieve change. Clearly, old attitudes still die hard in some quarters.

The real surprise, however, is that despite the widespread strategic focus, some 52% of maintenance is still reactive rather than proactive. That's only a 1% improvement on last year. Of course, it's not necessarily a universal truth that proactive is better than reactive. Where there is spare capacity, or there is a clear distinction between critical and non-critical equipment, run-to-failure can sometimes make economic sense. Those surveyed rate around 36% of their equipment as mission critical – at the top end – with around 20% being more the norm. Assessments like that are fundamental to making a judgment on where to deploy the extra resources needed for predictive activity.

Even more fundamental is clear sight of exactly what downtime costs you. For those able to put a figure on it, the majority face losses under £10,000, although 7% face an eye-watering £30,000-plus per hour. What is really worrying, however, is the volume of sites that simply have no idea of the costs. Not in sales, not in productivity, not in overheads per hour. Nearly 40% of these businesses do not have the base level information to even assess the efficacy of their current maintenance spend, let alone start building a strategy for better performance.

The workforce's understanding of how the site's machinery is used and maintained continues to cause concern. Overall, knowledge is creeping upwards, but at a snail-like pace. There are patches of real achievement: 13% think their operators get the maximum performance out of their plant. And nearly 40% believe their people do pretty well in coaxing efficient running. But that still leaves some 42% who could be sharper and 6% report that operators' mistakes are common.

Overall, the devolution of basic maintenance tasks to the shopfloor continues, but in a somewhat half-hearted fashion. Despite the clear advantages of operator involvement – take a look at the comments from HK Timbers and Camfil Farr (see the box above) – it has scarcely risen in the past year. Under 20% involve the whole shopfloor in maintenance although the number rises to 58% among higher grades such as team leaders. But that still leaves nearly a quarter of all production people hollering for expensive maintenance staff to bring the grease gun.

The majority of those sites moving towards greater operator involvement train on the job (71%) although nearly a third are linking progress to NVQ qualifications and about the same are wrapping maintenance skills into their apprenticeship programmes. Just under a third of the sites also call in external experts for more in-depth training. And the majority of those who do train are making it clear that they expect employees to take it seriously – 60% link maintenance activities to performance reviews. But that still leave 40% not taking the obvious step to underlining its importance.

The skills shortage is real. Perhaps this is not unrelated to the fact that only around a third of the sites have formal maintenance training programmes for engineers and a chunk of those are restricted to new recruits. That leaves 60% training only as and when required and 6% being left to figure it out for themselves. Overall, these figures are actually worse than last year in terms of the number of people being trained, although 38% state that their overall training investment has increased.

It is possible that more companies are focusing their efforts and budgets on a specialist cadre, while simply allowing the bulk of their engineers to just chug along.
About a fifth of the sites are looking to increase their maintenance team in the next 12 months, but there is evidence they won't find it easy. The chances are, however, that they will still compete for skills in a shrinking market rather than buy in third party support.

Somewhat surprisingly, the move to outsourcing is not pronounced – only 7% will move that way in the next 12 months. And, although every site outsources some part of its maintenance, it is usually only a fraction of the whole.

Nearly half outsource only 10%, few go beyond 22% and only one respondent outsources the whole. What stops them? Cost is clearly a consideration although most of the external maintenance companies are adamant they more than earn their keep in improved uptime and reduced running costs. Despite that, about a quarter of the sites doubt the ability of third parties to understand their processes. The main reason, however, is a clear conviction – 58% — that they can do it better themselves. It reflects a pride in the workplace. It is to be hoped, however, that this happy band does not include those who don't even know the cost of their downtime. Clearly, reports of the death of the in-house maintenance team have been exaggerated.

An interesting aside to the outsourcing picture is the attitude to managing maitenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) spares. Although this is a common third party service, only 5% are thinking of heading that way. And, although a fifth want to see a greater return on their spares inventory and a further third are looking to reduce their spend in this area, it just isn't a high priority for many. Over 36% are adamant that preventing downtime is more important than tying up cash in the store.

Despite all the difficulties, there are tangible achievements. The focus on health and safety is pronounced, as indeed it ought to be. Only six sites report any accidents due to failure of plant maintenance and, of those, the only serious one was a manufacturer's defect in a new machine. And – despite all the strictures – unplanned downtime is falling on more sites (41%) than rising (29%). What is more, only 11% of sites are content to plough on without measuring the effectiveness of their maintenance operation. Downtime, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and breakdown rate are still the favourite yardsticks, either singly or in combination.

Sites employ a wide variety of maintenance techniques although there is some measure of total productive maintenance (TPM) in evidence across 62% of factory floors. The voting pattern for the winning technique in Strictly Come Maintaining is pretty clear: reliability centred maintenance (RCM) at 39% heads the list for most, although Hoshin planning (33%) and root cause analysis (23%) are close behind. Kepner Tregoe – a method of problem analysis that looks for something distinguishing what the problem is from what it is not – attracts a surprisingly devoted following among the small number that use it. Although there's clearly a steady appreciation of the effectiveness of TPM, it rarely achieves the star ratings of RCM – possibly a result of the fact that wholehearted, plant-wide roll outs are still rare.

Four predictive techniques still lead the way, although thermal imaging (62%), oil analysis (54%) and acoustic emission monitoring (31%) have slightly lost ground on last year's scores whereas vibration analysis (41%) is 12% up on 2012. The widespread use of forecasting tools indicates that the majority of plants are still aiming for proper planned maintenance management even if the reality of production demands often conflict with the theory.

Key points
52% say sustaining ageing plant is their biggest challenge.
52% of maintenance activity is reactive against 48% proactive.
13% of operators get the best out of their plant; 42% could be sharper.
72% of training is ad hoc or on-the-job.
76% have a formal maintenance strategy. Downtime periods and OEE are the main measures of maintenance effectiveness.

Annie Gregory

Related Companies
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