Elevating The Status Of 4.5 Million U.S. Maintenance Workers By Celebrating Unsung Heroes

Post written by

Ryan Chan

CEO at UpKeep Maintenance Management.

In the U.S. workforce alone, there are over 4.5 million general installation, maintenance and repair workers keeping life as we know it running. Businesses that utilize maintenance teams may have a general sense of how their fixers and builders impact their work, but how much time are you dedicating to celebrating the unsung heroes who keep your businesses thriving and growing in the background?

Maintenance teams not only sustain huge sectors, such as wastewater treatment and 3D printing and manufacturing; they also keep families’ homes safe and the local hospitals functioning, while conserving the roads running between those homes and hospitals. It’s time that leadership across all of these industries understand the importance of the preventative tasks their maintenance teams take on each and every day, not only to avoid issues, but to help their organizations thrive.

The commonly held perception of maintenance workers is that they’re predominantly engaged in damage control, fixing problems after they arise. A lot of leadership teams associate maintenance with what they see and remember. For example: A piece of equipment breaks down and someone fixes it. While this repair person certainly deserves praise for saving the day in this instance, I want to call attention to the other behind-the-scenes team members who prevented countless other issues in the first place. Both deserve praise and recognition, and this starts with those leaders who are a bit removed from the day-to-day operations at their organization educating themselves about the importance of preventative maintenance.

The Importance Of Preventative Maintenance

One of the most important functions of a great maintenance team is preventative maintenance or reliability, which means anticipating problems and nipping them in the bud before they impart costly consequences. The impact of these actions may be most immediately clear when we consider the cost savings alone of a great preventative maintenance program.

Industrial manufacturers incur $50 billion in unplanned downtime each year, 42% of which is caused by equipment failing. It’s time to shift our society’s definition of maintenance from focusing solely on reactive maintenance’s “firefighting model” to preventative maintenance’s more efficient “fire prevention and response” model. If leadership teams themselves focus on this shift, manufacturers can save billions of dollars and an equally enormous amount of time. How exactly can we do this?

Track tasks and recognize them.

It’s vital to measure preventative maintenance from as many possible angles, celebrating efficiencies and constantly exploring possibilities for improvement.

Maintenance teams’ potential to transform businesses is immense:

They can improve productivity.

They can reduce downtime.

They can extend asset lifetime.

All of this, however, requires that you have an important tool in your toolbelt: a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS).

Companies often don't track the monetary impact maintenance saves the wider business, instead focusing on activities that end in more money being made.

For example, it's much easier to report, “We bought two new manufacturing lines, which generated X in bottom line revenue,” rather than “We reduced downtime and prevented Y breakdowns causing Z savings.” This isn’t necessarily leadership’s fault – more often than not, there is simply no data on the latter. The only way to really look at the impact preventative maintenance tasks have on your business is to stop doing what you're doing and measure it. To do this, consider tracking activities in a CMMS and focus on preventative maintenance tasks that have long-term benefits to the company.

Keep track of KPIs and celebrate them.

For maintenance teams, once you are reporting on preventative maintenance tasks, a great way to measure their impact is by establishing actionable goals and better key performance indicators (KPIs) that emphasize uptime. Instead of only tracking downtime metrics, such as response time to breakdowns, companies should also track how much uptime a facility is experiencing relative to the previous month or year.

This concept applies to more than just the manufacturing industry. The software industry, for example, has a lot to benefit from a similar perception shift. Instead of continuously writing new code to replace code with a short shelf life, celebrating code that’s written and updated so well it rarely has to be completely rewritten can streamline productivity and boost reliability.

Stay mindful.

This shift in awareness requires a rediscovered appreciation for human decision-making and critical thinking. The mainstream perception is that technological innovations like automation and artificial intelligence will do all of the work for us. But the truth is, the results of this technology aren’t simply going to fall into our laps. Innovating and improving preventative maintenance processes requires human insight, interpretation and prioritization. Ultimately, humans have to decide what’s working and what’s not. It’s our human obligation to celebrate the work of unsung heroes, especially if we want that work to continue. If we learn how to recognize and champion these prevention and reliability workers, we can elevate the status of the entire maintenance profession.
