October 28, 2015 Industry Forum Blog One of the more common barriers to change we meet when introducing Autonomous Maintenance and Planned Maintenance is the belief that maintenance engineers will become deskilled and jobs cut, and that production operators will be expected to just take on more tasks. It’s important to tackle this misconception right at the beginning of your TPM programme. Although it will take time to gain trust, I have found starting with a straightforward explanation helps to set the scene. After that, your actions will speak louder than words! Make sure you give the same message to AM and PM team members, as they must work in tandem to achieve the change. You can draw up the two sketches shown here to support your message, but do tailor them to suit your audience. Yes – the activities you do will change and so will the skills you need! Use this diagram to show how the mix of skills and activities undertaken by the teams changes over a period of time. On the left you have a representation of the start point. Draw these to show what you think they are in your company at that point. We usually expect changes to occur over a 3 year period. On the right finish the lines at a point to reflect where you plan to be. This will align with your policies. Don’t get hung up about actual numbers. You are trying to show that over a period of years there should be a change in the mix of tasks carried out. Some companies find this phrase helps. “Everybody takes care of something different.” How can we do any more than we do now? It’s not realistic to expect people to just keep doing more. Draw this diagram, block by block from the left, to show how some current, and unrewarding, tasks are got rid of, so that new ones can be introduced. The first block represents the current skills and tasks carried out by operators and the maintenance department. The first thing we have to do is eliminate what we call the difficult, dangerous and dirty tasks, which operators should not have to do. This is achieved using the AM pillar. We are now at position 1. This allows more time for the operators to take on new tasks. In the AM journey these tasks are cleaning, inspection and lubrication. These are transferred from the maintenance team. We are now at position 2. Of course these CIL tasks also prevent the difficult, dangerous and dirty tasks from coming back. So we prevent a return to the start point. Now the maintenance team have time to expand their role and take on new tasks, such as preventative maintenance and developing new maintenance techniques. Position 3 is reached. The benefits Operators spend less time doing repetitive and pointless cleaning up. They can learn and deploy basic maintenance skills, reducing the frustration of running equipment till it breaks and then waiting for it to be fixed. Maintenance engineers move away from a repair based culture and learn how to deploy more sophisticated techniques and technologies. This allows them to spend more time concentrating on maintenance activities that will give improvements. For both teams there is a shift towards a greater proportion of proactive tasks. Hopefully this message will help you to dispel any fears expressed at the start of your TPM journey. Nobody is being deskilled. Time generated is used to make further improvements. For more information about TPM training see our web site or contact us.
