During an era of acute manufacturing expertise and labor shortage across the world, business leaders may be worried about the sustainability of their industrial operations. Most importantly, the lack of incoming talent is dramatically increasing dependency on the most experienced members of operations and maintenance departments, many of whom are approaching retirement age.
When these individuals leave your organization, what could happen? Is there a chance that you may lose a gold mine of experience and knowledge that hasn’t properly been documented or captured?
To help leaders deal with this challenge and plan for a generational shift in operations and maintenance talent, we’d like to highlight the importance of standardizing and documenting maintenance best practices.
Standardize Maintenance Procedures
Inconsistent maintenance practices can cause mistakes, inefficiencies, and even costly equipment failures. Organizations should strive to create standard procedures which enable their teams to follow the same work steps, leading to improved equipment reliability and consistency in maintenance operations.
As highlighted earlier, documenting these standard practices also reduces your reliance on human experience and knowledge, which you may stand to lose from your organization.
Maintenance leaders can facilitate workshops with internal and external specialists to capture their knowledge in work procedures. Further workshops may be conducted, annually for example, to review procedures and improve/update them based on new information or experience.
With an up-to-date dynamic knowledge base, your organization can stay competitive, ready to adapt to changing operational needs while bringing revenue and cost management success.
Apply Procedures in your CMMS
Certain CMMS products allow you to create your standard procedures as digital work order templates, which can then be utilized during actual maintenance activity.
Imagine a world in which the technician has sequential work steps on their mobile device as they are standing in the field, ticking off steps as they proceed through the activity. This way of working can dramatically increase work order success and efficiency, helping your organization maximize uptime while supporting technicians in achieving their efficiency targets.
Creating digital work order templates can be a time-consuming process, but is one that will pay dividends for many years to come. Consider putting together a task force who is responsible for digitalizing work procedures over some weeks or months since those same individuals may need bandwidth for day to day planning and execution.
Improve Training and Onboarding
As experienced personnel leave or retire from your organization, you have to replace them with younger workers who may not have the same depth or competency. At minimum, they will lack the specific expertise relevant to your assets and sites. Finding ways to train and onboard these new individuals can help bridge the gap caused by employee turnover.
Well-documented maintenance practices give you a solid foundation of training material for new hires. When combined with asset management information and work history in a robust CMMS, training can be extended to practical use cases that combine the asset, the site, and the procedure into one learning program.
It’s important to remember that training new recruits in technology and applications is just as important as their actual maintenance training. In a digitally enabled world, engineers and technicians must be taught how to use software to improve their own work efficiency. Build your training program with live activities in your CMMS so that engineers and technicians can get hands-on experience before heading into the field.
Sensys provides the asset, maintenance, and knowledge management functionality to achieve everything mentioned in this article. Our team is here to help you capture and standardize your maintenance processes, ensuring that your organization is well-equipped to meet both current and future challenges.
Find out more or schedule a demo by reaching out to us!
