Maintenance Technology September 2016 - 91

30 In cases such as these, it works well to assign shift maintenance of small, multi-craft crews to specific banks of equipment. They are the first responders to these breakdowns. Coming off of break-in logs kept by the operators, they insulate the balance of the maintenance resources (the day crew) from break-in work (Priority 1's and 2's). This allows the other maintenance crews to complete their Priority 3 schedules without interruption. The challenge is managing fluctuations in workload. This is addressed by the supervisor. It is important to review the break-in logs daily. Open entries older than eight hours are assigned to the day crew by generating a work order. Conversely, where workloads are low, the shift crew should have ready bench work available when there are no breakdowns. Implement and Sustain It A perfect plant-wide prioritization system will not work unless it is used by the entire organization- operations, engineering, maintenance, etc. Implementation is critical to the success of this system. If you have used a credible, crossfunctional team to design it, you have a head start. These team members should be an integral part of your implementation rollout, training, and coaching. While the Information Technology (IT) team may be involved in setting up the system programming and menus, they should not be the trainers. They lack the operational knowledge to answer the what-if questions that inevitably come up during training. Namely, the IT trainer can't answer an operator's question about the applicability of a specific backup pump. Your cross-functional team has that knowledge and the credibility with the users. They are, in effect, your salespeople for the system. IT can and should help provide the training documentation. But in the end, the crossfunctional team provides the classroom delivery and training exercises. If you need additional trainers, prepare other operations people to fill that need. In the best possible case, the training should include real examples for generating and prioritizing work requests. Have trainees bring real examples of the work they need done to generate and prioritize requests live in the training class. Then, the training should be conducted in computer-equipped training rooms. The follow-up coaching will monitor compliance to the system and its guidelines for several weeks after implementation training. The coaching is necessary because the classroom cannot cover every possible scenario. And some people do not necessarily learn well, or at all, in a classroom setting. Hands-on experience can be a more effective teacher. Personal follow-up and coaching will help. If you do not follow up closely on the classroom training, bad habits will start and then spread through the organization. Coaches should go out into the work areas with request generators to watch them generate live requests. We have found that this will remove barriers to compliance that were not known before, such as someone's work area lacking access to a useable computer. There can be numerous fixes like that coming out through coaching in the work areas. Coaches also monitor the accuracy of prioritization. Where they find errors, they should consult with the requestor for clarification. Interestingly, we have found that some of the biggest violators are the managers above line management. Those are the non-compliance incidents we, as consultants, are asked to handle because we have no career politics on the line. SOLUTIONS AUGUST 2016 10127-4056 SMRP Solutions SE.indd 30 8/22/16 9:43 AM

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Maintenance Technology September 2016