Reflecting on history, the maintenance department, as we know it, didn’t appear until the early 20th century, at the advent of the age of mechanization brought about by the likes of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. Driven by two world wars and a rabid consumer-product industry, a once agrarian society rapidly progressed into a mechanized-production-line society.

The articulate skills of the previous century’s millwrights and craftsmen tasked with the design, building, and maintenance of single-power-source factories began to be replaced with the more “maintenance only”-focused journeymen trades whose sole purpose was to keep mechanized production lines running at all costs.

Evident throughout this period of history was the abundance of labor to run and maintain the equipment, which was, in turn, carefully overseen and controlled by large supervisory and management teams.

A CHANGING PARADIGM
In recent years, computerization has flattened management organizations (including the maintenance organaization), reduced the need for constant operator care, and changed equipment design to facilitate a modular, sub-assembly, “switch and replace” type of maintenance strategy that requires less-skilled maintenance staffs with fewer maintenance supervisory and management staff.

Ironically, while maintenance staffing has been reduced, IT staffing has continued to grow in many organizations. Yet despite such growth, I've seen many a maintenance department held hostage, waiting days, if not weeks, for the IT department to run a simple report. Sound familiar?

That type of frustrating scenario isn't always the fault of the IT department, however.

Many maintenance organizations haven’t taken time to understand the importance of quality  planning and scheduling processes when it comes to setting in place good relationships between maintainers, suppliers, and clients.

Instead, they have seemingly chosen to abdicate their responsibility and pass it on to IT implementers who, in turn, often defer to work-order setups rather than work-management setups.

RECLAIM RESPONSIBILITY
Given the many hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of dollars that can be spent on software development to deliver nothing more than a basic, user-friendly, work-order system, it behooves a maintenance department to take back responsibility and truly understand the positive impact best-practice planning and scheduling processes have on a maintenance organization and plan their software needs around such processes and requirements.

In the responsible charge of a competent planning, scheduling, and supervisory group, almost any maintenance-management software can be used effectively to facilitate delivery of a best-practice maintenance program.

To learn more about impact of planning and scheduling on your operations, click on the the following link to my recent feature article, "7 Pillars: Best-Practice Planning and Scheduling," on The RAM Review website. It's the first in a series of articles on this important topic that we'lll be posting in coming months.

kbannister@theramreview.com

(Editor's Note: Ken Bannister can also be contacted directly at 519-469-9173.)