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Outsourcing: More Than Wrench-Turning

27/05/2006
Fabricating & Metalworking

It's no secret that of all the skilled trades, maintenance professionals represent the most endangered species. With an average age in the low- to mid-50s, they will retire in droves over the next decade and take their knowledge with them. Job fairs offer huge signing bonuses to technical-school grads willing to take the maintenance career path.

Companies put forward enticing carrots for a reason. For many in manufacturing, corrective maintenance still rules the day, as workers continually put out fires and do their best to get in front of the eight-ball. Yet they remain a prime target for finger-pointing.

To fix matters, more companies are turning maintenance over to outside firms. Once scoffed at as giving up a company's core function, it's now making sense for some. The core competencies of more American manufacturers are sliding toward design, engineering and making quality parts, and away from keeping production running smoothly.

But according to Stephen Welch, sales director for Peoria, Ill.-based Advanced Technology Services (www.advancedtech.com), shops shouldn't dive into maintenance outsourcing just to find skill sets. That, he says, won't solve the problem. "Yes, bringing about maintenance improvement is partly better skill sets," he says, "but it's mostly systems and processes." It's not about contracting out, say, three pipe-fitters, two mechanics and one electrician. "That doesn't bring about much change at all," he says. "If your maintenance isn't performing well, you need to look beyond just hiring skills and bodies, and look more toward systems and the processes in the systems."

The systems he refers to require a transformation from corrective, or "fireman," maintenance to a combination of preventive, predictive and reliability maintenance: keystones to a plant's lean-manufacturing initiative. Such elements of total productive maintenance (TPM) need leadership to effect change on the shop floor.

Part of that may be due to the dichotomy of personalities "lean" maintenance demands. It requires people who can focus on a process or a machine, know it inside and out; they know how componentry works to create a smoothly running wholeÂ-;so smooth, in fact, the work remains invisible to others.

The other part of modern maintenance, leadership, can't be invisible. It needs big, strategic thinking, and the ability to communicate that to top management and the bean counters. Maintenance professionals must trumpet the lack of qualified talent and find solutions. If a company has such leadership on staff, then completely outsourced maintenance may not be the answer. But these people, Welch says, represent an even rarer breed than the skilled pipe-fitter, electrician or mechanic. And without these leaders, a maintenance program isn't likely to change.

Interpretation of what a company considers "core competency" can be a subject of continual debate. Regardless, within any company culture, anything outsourced shouldn't be considered core, or quality and personnel problems will surely result, Welch says, particularly in the "lean world" of modern manufacturing.

In a traditional job shop, if one machine went down, other machines could pick up the slack. There remained redundancies, however inefficient.

To compete today, shops have adopted the cellular concept. And though it squeezes out inefficient redundancies, it also leaves a shop skating on thin ice. Machine reliability becomes more important; if one machine goes out, the entire cell stops, and the costs mount.

"The ability for asset reliability and asset productivity is so much greater in metal cutting today than it ever has been," Welch says. "That is why it is so imperative they change the way they look at maintenance."

This makes the decision for outsourcing all the more challenging. Choosing the wrong company can be disastrous. First, of course, ensure production equipment is the outsourcing company's forte. The techs must know CNCs, machining centers, circuit boards, spindles, motors, transfer lines and everything in between.

Second, the company must embrace the lean enterprise. That means, Welch says, that it shouldn't "contract out to 25 maintenance people to run around fixing things that break."

It's a tighter relationship that involves everyone from upper management to, most importantly, the machine operators themselves.

"Operator maintenance is a key element to any total productive maintenance program," he explains, "because there has to be a sense of ownership by the operators in their equipment."

Welch calls this "cooperative maintenance," and he feels most good maintenance programs can't live without it. No matter how much maintenance a shop outsources, operators need to know the certain audio and visual checks to keep machines healthy: where to look for oil leaks, how to listen for bearing problems and so forth.

He feels any maintenance contractor should foster this kind of culture. (For this reason, he says, ATS does not contract with shops with unions working under historical work rules.) Machine checklists illustrating what to maintain where are provided, placed right on the machinery for the operator's use.

Such systems epitomize the changing role of maintenance away from wrench-turning and toward in-depth analysis, from simple oil changes to the complexities of finding a problem's root cause. "In a lean environment, you can't afford downtime, period," he says. "No matter how fast you can fix it, it's not good enough. In order to become more analytical and intellectual in the approach to maintenance, you've got to have data, and computerized maintenance management systems are the repository for all the data." That data, in turn, help today's new breed of analytical maintenance professionals determine why things happen, when and how.

The systems also tell companies what they're usingÂ-;particularly parts and supplies. "Many times, these are an absolute disaster in metal manufacturing plants," Welch says. Many don't have a handle on how much they spend on spare-parts inventory. "Most plants expense their parts," he says. Maintenance people with the authority to order may purchase three of one part, put one in the machine and the remaining two in their toolbox. This creates "parts mayhem," Welch explains, with too many of the wrong parts and not enough of the right ones.

A CMMS, on the other hand, ties the part system in with the work-order system, which ties those costs with specific machines and processes. "You can track how much you're spending on a given machine, and what kind of parts are failing." Without it, "you're missing a huge component of the root-cause system."

Regardless of whether using an outside maintenance company that offers CMMS services or not, companies should outsource not just wrench-turning, Welch says, but the analysis behind the wrench-turning. Otherwise, a plant's poor maintenance track record won't likely change.

It brings up a significant question: How will the outsource company culture meld with the manufacturer's? Plants bringing in companies to take over maintenance completely, he says, are often in the middle of a culture change themselves.

"And we've found maintenance is usually one of the biggest resistors to change," Welch explains. "They're usually the most experienced and highly paid people, the most vocal, and usually the ones with the most to lose if a significant change happens."

For this reason, companies should seek out maintenance contractors with fundamentally similar cultures, and who will support the culture change, he says.

What happens to existing employees? Outsource companies use two approaches, each with its positives and negatives, Welch says. One, they simply transition all plant maintenance workers to their own payroll. A big plus: It makes the transition seamless. A negative: culture change is likely to take some time and, during that time, some may end up losing their jobs, particularly if they don't adapt to change.

In a second approach (and the one ATS uses), the outsource company interviews current maintenance staff. Those who don't fit certain pre-determined criteria, "we're not going to hire," he says. Criteria for ATS primarily focus not on technical skill sets but on attitude. "We can train the skills; we can't train the attitude, at least in the short term."

The big positive: This effects change quickly and relatively smoothly. The negative: Job losses. True, workers with bad attitudes often make up the majority of those losses, which isn't altogether negative.

"In metal cutting, that has not been the case," he says. "Metal cutting has been pretty lax and negligent historically in its approach to maintenance; a few machines go down, and the rest of the plant still runs."

With lean manufacturing, all this changes. "Redundant machine tools are thing of the past; you can't move jobs from a broken machine to one that works anymore." Welch concludes: "Metal cutting is going through a huge, fundamental change of how it does businessÂ-;and maintenance has to do business differently to support this kind of environment."