Where would any operation be without maintenance teams? They’re the reason equipment runs, production stays on schedule, and safety and functionality levels are upheld throughout a facility. When a maintenance team is properly staffed with skilled individuals, everything works. Equipment hums along as preventive maintenance occurs on time, and small concerns are repaired before they amount to costly catastrophes.
Yet teams like this need to be constructed, maintained, and sustained. Maintenance personnel require strictly trained skills, hands-on experience and troubleshooting capabilities in on-the-spot conditions. It’s a process to discover people with the necessary talent — and even more of a challenge to retain them. However, reaping the rewards of greater uptime, reduced equipment longevity costs and reliable repairs is no small fee.
What Makes a Good Maintenance Team
A proper maintenance department is more than just those who can fix something when it breaks. Good teams consist of those who specialize in particular equipment, those who can serve general functions and those who have diagnostic skills that keep things from breaking down in the first place.
Preventive maintenance technicians are those who keep equipment consistently working through routine checks and scheduled servicing. They note wear and tear before replacement is necessary, suggesting replacement in time before failure; these technicians take notes as they work and keep records for themselves and supervisors, detailing the condition of anything subject to wear. These professionals are worth their weight in gold because these are the technicians who prevent costly breakdowns which impede production.
Next come the specialists — those who have real know-how of HVAC systems, industrial controls, hydraulics, or whatever facilities run. When something going wrong is particularly involved, having someone on staff who thoroughly understands how it operates saves hours if not days trying to get an external contractor on-site or calling stakeholders to troubleshoot from scratch.
Where Good Maintenance People Come From
The best maintenance technicians come from trades backgrounds — electrical, mechanical repairs or equipment operating on their own or from other employed situations that bring real hands-on experience. There are those who attend technical school or apprenticeships for industrial maintenance single-mindedly. Whatever the case, these are people with proven time spent actually fixing up as opposed to learning about.
Some companies find success hiring internal candidates with some kind of mechanical aptitude and subsequently training them on-site given a specific need. For those companies looking to fill vacancies quickly or provide expertise that no one currently has on team, companies providing maintenance support services staffing give the connection needed without the lag time of hiring new employees. This works for temporary gaps, seasonal demand or specialists needed for a niche area or appeal.
Developing internally takes time and commitment but builds loyalty and creates technicians who thoroughly know a process. This investment pays off handsomely when those people know your equipment inside and out.
The Skills that Matter Most
Technical skill is important — and maintenance technicians need to understand how machinery runs in order to fix them. But beyond that, problem-solving skills matter. The best maintenance technicians can deduce where the problem lies without using a repair book because they’re familiar with multiple areas of service.
Subsequently, communication is more important than one might think. They need to effectively collaborate with scheming patterns for production runs to ensure immediate issues are addressed; they must be able to communicate with non-technical managers about what’s going wrong before executives can properly address it; and their work needs to be documented clearly. If there’s an issue, having a technician who can articulate their findings, what’s going to take place and how to prevent it from happening again is invaluable.
Reliability goes hand-in-hand with sound judgment as these professionals are often working in non-supervised realms. While they can get tickets written for problems that need resolution (and resolve them in time for a next shift), they also must operate independently and determine if action needs to be taken right away or if there’s a delay in resolution that’s acceptable. Companies need people whom they can trust to take care of them — especially when nobody’s looking.
Staffing Flexibly Where Necessary
Not every operation is going to need the same sized team year round. Manufacturing operations may need more hands during peak seasons; certain projects may call for specialized skills that don’t make sense to have all the time staffed; when new equipment comes in, it may require parts that necessitate having more hands-on deck for temporary periods until setup is complete.
Flexibility is key when maintaining support staffing over maintenance personnel. Holding onto a lower core number of permanent employees who know the facility intimately enough to call upon help from others when demand spikes makes practical sense to reign in unnecessary expenses when coverage isn’t desperately needed.
Of those ancillary technicians brought on board temporarily — or even contract to hire — these maintenance professionals can become trial runs for permanent hires. Bringing someone in for a job opens doors both ways for both parties to vet one another for fit. Companies can see how efficiently someone works, while technicians can get a sense of culture and functioning from within before committing long-term.
Technology Changes Everything
Gone are the days of making appointments for maintenance; maintenance management systems have changed everything — and 21st-century computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) help promote preventive maintenance via work orders needing internal approval; inventory control processes line goods up that will run out or need replacement just as folks finish what they’re working on, and all this information is analyzed on how often these needs crop up per machine.
For smaller teams — those inevitably stressed — organization supplements necessary data collection made possible by technology. Predictive assessment tools give data analytics the power to flag potential problems down the line versus immediate failures; meaning maintaining output can occur instead of responding reactively.
Such stress alleviation is better for the team — and allows them more time preventing issues versus trying to rectify emergencies.
What Success Should Look Like
Companies with outstanding maintenance personnel constantly run at uptime metrics where failure is no longer an option.
Production schedules become more realistic because breakdowns no longer happen unexpectedly — and longevity costs are cut down because time is on a machine’s side long before it’s off.
Less tangible but equally salient operating provides peace of mind — all teams do is operate better without worrying about mishaps occurring due to avoidable complications.
Establishing a team like this takes effort — but without doing so, continuous success is improbable relative to operations who hold maintenance professionals accountable as staffing solutions at all times putting everything running on it for all vested parties’ interests.
