Maintenance managers lead all of the maintenance operations within an organization, including installation, repair, and upkeep of company equipment and facilities. The job of maintenance managers is to ensure the equipment and facilities that support an organization's operations run smoothly. They also coordinate with other departments to optimize the company's overall use of resources, including capital assets like production and material handling equipment and operating expenses like labor and energy costs.
As a key role within operations, maintenance managers may be tempted to keep their heads down and stay focused on solving any issues before they affect operations. But this approach may hurt them, and their companies, in the long run.
Instead, here are 3 ways maintenance managers can be more visible, to level up their impact and proactively help their companies handle the unexpected.
3 Strategies the Best Maintenance Managers Use
1. Manage Up
Whether your manager is an engineering manager or plant manager, or both, maintenance managers will be expected to manage and report on two key areas: performance and costs. To make sure leadership understands which problems are maintenance related, and which are not, as well as build trust that you're on top of it, use root cause analysis to identify the true causes of things like unexpected downtime and employee overtime.
Communicate regularly, with data, so everyone understands what, why and how something happened, as well as what can be done to prevent it from happening again. The goal is to answer questions before they're asked.
2. Incorporate Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)
RCM is a framework to understand the core functions and failures of different pieces of equipment to make maintenance optimization strategies more effective, more predictive, and more risk based. It involves ranking how critical different assets are to operations and analyzing how and why they can fail, and then creating a strategy for each asset to perform as expected (including how its functions can be reliably performed if there is a failure).
The goal of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is for functions to continue without (or with very minimal) interruption.
3. Use Technology and Delegate
Maintenance managers cannot do it all, so key to success is leveraging easy-to-use tools, whether software like enterprise asset management (EAM) or computerized maintenance management software (CMMS), or physical equipment that eliminates maintenance, like automated wireless charging.
Centralize data and planning in one place, from work orders to equipment health, so everyone can access information and make the best decisions. Then task team members like technicians, supervisors, and planners to own different areas like cross-team communications, spare part analysis and procurement, breakdown management, planning and scheduling, dealing with contractors, writing permits, and more.
When done well, maintenance is a profit center for organizations, and maintenance managers are champions of continuous operations and efficiency. These are just a few of the many things the best maintenance managers do. As maintenance managers continue to grow their knowledge of, advocate for, and implement more proactive strategies to maximize asset utilization, it would be wise for companies to listen.
To learn how automated wireless charging helps companies reduce and eliminate maintenance tasks, contact our team today. You can also learn more about the best preventative maintenance strategies for logistics and warehouse fleets here.
