August 2005 - Library

22
A
Implementing
Change In A
Maintenance Team
- Is It Possible?
BSTRACT
Michael W. Killick
OpEx Management Ltd (New Zealand)
In today’s modern business environment, organisations are continually looking to improve the perf o rmance of their operation in
o rder to remain competitive in their chosen industry. If an organisation is in the manufacturing industry they face the additional
p re s s u re of outsourcing non-core business functions or, at the extreme end of outsourcing, changing from a local to overseas
manufacturing operating where the plant is located in developing nations.
To ensure that local manufacturing remains competitive, organisation needs to operate with high plant utilisation, high productivity
(both in terms of physical resources and human resources) and cost effective expenditure. Further to this, the organisation has to
have a workforce that is focused on a common goal and works together as one large effective team that is continuously improving
the level of performance.
However in manufacturing industry, the achievement of ‘one large effective team’ is not an easy exercise due to the (traditional)
conflicting requirements of the production and maintenance management teams - production want the plant operating to produce
widgets while maintenance want the plant shutdown to perform maintenance.
In order to overcome this, the maintenance team needs to take the lead and break the traditional approach to asset management
(the combination of production and maintenance management) and apply a total asset management focus as to how the org a n i s a t i o n
manages it assets - such an approach being underpinned by the concept of Business Centred Maintenance 1 .
But to achieve Business Centred Maintenance requires a radical paradigm shift in the maintenance team culture. This shift can
be achieved through various means but for it to be sustainable, a clearly defined change management process must be developed
and implemented.
This paper will outline how the maintenance team can achieve this paradigm shift through the implementation of an effective change
management process that is guided by the principles of the Change Management Cycle 2 .
THE TRADITIONAL MAINTENANCE ORGANISATION
World-wide maintenance practice has taken three major evolutionary steps in the last fifty years. Up until the advent of sophisticated
analytical techniques, maintenance practice was largely of a reactive ‘fire fighting’ mode where machine failure was considered
inevitable and the role of maintenance staff was to react quickly to limit the impact of the failure.
The development of more sophisticated tools in the 1970’s, to more accurately understand the current perf o rmance and state of
wear of equipment and machinery, allowed maintenance practices to evolve to the point where the dominant maintenance activity
could be driven by actual machine condition. While in the last 20 years, a new kind of maintenance practice has evolved based on
a comprehensive understanding of the nature of the failure and how the failure can be subsequently mitigated. These three main
changes in maintenance practice are highlighted in Figure 1.
During the last decade organisations have faced an increasing pressure from shareholders to improve the return on investments
of manufacturing plant - to do this, organisations have to improve plant utilisation and plant productivity. As a result organisations
began to recognise the importance of effective maintenance management as being essential to the core business operation. This
recognition then drove the field of maintenance management to become a business focussed organisation where profitability and
competitiveness became the main focus of an organisation. But the real question still remained as to how best to approach managing
the maintenance team as a business.