Terry Wireman's Blog

How Divergent is Your Thinking?

I ran across a very interesting video on YouTube the other day.  It can be found at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U . 

It is an amazing video about the American Educational System and how it falls short of delivering what our children need in education to function in industry today.  It is well worth watching when you have the ten minutes it takes to view it – However you may want to leave some time at the end to think about the message in the video.

As many of you know (or not) I have a lot of passion around education, especially as it relates to the technical skills of the maintenance and reliability professionals.  This video really drives a couple of key points that can be applied in this area.  The first is that it is not necessary for everyone to go to college.  Yet, the educational system in the US drives every student to go to college.  This is one of the main reasons that we do not have many apprentice programs left.  No one has been enrolling – so the law of supply and demand is invoked and there are fewer apprentice programs for students  to enroll in…  While the video says it is easier to get a job with a college education, it is not a guarantee.  In fact in Matthew Crawford’s book (Shopcraft as Soulcraft), he recommends that all high school students apprentice in a trade before going to college.  His point is, he has never seen a tradesperson that wants to work not be able to find work in their trade.  Can the same be said for everyone having a college degree?

The second main point the video makes is that we need to be able to think “laterally”.  This means that there are many different answers to questions.  We cannot keep forcing children into molds that dampen their creativity.  This only sets them up in their careers to think there is only one way to do a particular task.  They cannot “think out of the box”.  In today’s business environment, we need people to “think out of the box”.  Otherwise, we are going to keep attempting to solve new problems using old solutions.  This does not sound like a successful approach to me -  (More to come)

What if there is NO clerical support?

When most of the clerical positions were eliminated from maintenance and reliability organizations, it was with the hope that technology would enable the supervisors, planners, and technicians to assume the responsibilities for the data entry, manipulations and analysis.

Unfortunately for most organizations, this did not happen.  While the technology was capable, the workload for the supervisors, planners and technicians did not lessen and left them with little or no time to fulfill their new clerical responsibilities.  So when it came down to budgeting their time, would they work towards getting one more repair finished or getting their clerical responsibilities finished? 

The answer is of course they finished the next repair.  Why? If the repair was not finished, the results would be highly visible and the maintenance department would be openly criticized for not finishing it.   If the clerical work was not finished, it is an internal issue to the department and other than a “YOU should have filled out the paperwork”, nothing bad happens.

Is this really true?  What is the cost of having chronic equipment problems that disrupt production?  What is the cost of repetitive maintenance repairs on equipment?  If companies do not collect accurate data and then analyze this data, they will continue to have these types of problems.

Unfortunately, these problems will not disappear until companies realize the value of accurate maintenance and reliability data and provide the clerical support necessary to manage their data.  An MIT study showed that there are trillions of dollars of underutilized assets in the United States.  Unless the utilization of these assets is increased, the US companies will not be competitive in the global marketplace.  It would be a considerable shock if the real root cause of not being able to compete globally is the lack of clerical support for maintenance and reliability organizations.

Additional Clerical Support???

I ran across another Peter Drucker quote and thought about how it applies to most maintenance and reliability organizations today.  The quote is:

“Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations... They now need more and more expensive clerks even though they call them 'operators' or 'programmers.'”

It is noteworthy that most maintenance and reliability organizations have implemented some type of CMMS/EAM system.  The CMMS/EAM system was meant to help process the necessary data for the maintenance/ reliability organization to run their business.  During a sales presentation or demonstration most of the CMMS/EAM systems focused on ease of use.  To management this implied that the data would be easy enough to enter into the system that they could let the technicians, supervisors, or planners do it.

For the most part, that much was true; they could do it.  But the real issue was should they do it?  How much of their time would be taken up in data collection, verification, entry, and manipulation?  But it only takes 5 minutes or less per work order!  Yet how many work orders does each technician perform each shift?  One? Two? Five? Ten? The more reactive an organization, the more individual trouble calls that are performed by each technician and the greater the time spent on correct data entry.  Of course there is always the incorrect route, which leaves to a lot of blanket work orders, which obscures the data necessary to perform true life cycle cost calculations.

The clerical help in the maintenance and reliability organizations was used to free up the technicians, supervisors, or planners to do their other work.  However, when the time came to reduce staff, would the maintenance manager lay off a technician, supervisor, or planner?  Or would they lay off a seemingly redundant clerical person?  Most managers chose the clerical person.  Now Peter Drucker’s quote should be adjusted to read:

“Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations... They now need more and more expensive clerks even though they call them ‘technicians, supervisors, or planners’.” 

So what is the true cost of operating a department without clerical support?  That will be the topic for the next blog…