How to make your maintenance organisation part of your business strategy

Traditionally, maintenance organisations in manufacturing companies have been seen as an unavoidable but necessary cost. However, as the industry becomes more digitised, the opportunity to be proactive and data-driven - and thus contribute to the company's strategic objectives - is increasing.

"With new and improved technical solutions, maintenance work can be more focused on preventing problems before they occur - perhaps even contributing to improvements in the quality and delivery of the end product," says Camilla Munther.

Developing ways of working that benefit from technology

She has a background as a researcher at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, focusing on organisation and change management in maintenance organisations. Today she works at RISE as a consultant, lecturer and inspirer for maintenance organisations undergoing change.

"Organisational change in this case is not about increasing or decreasing the number of technicians at a particular site, but about developing a way of working that makes the best use of today's technological possibilities."

To take advantage of sensors, faster and more powerful connections and AI, it is not enough to simply assign an employee to try to read and understand the data being generated on top of their regular work. The organisation may need to retrain existing staff, find new skills and roles, and perhaps even rethink leadership and management objectives in general.

At its core, this is about resource management and optimisation. Why install expensive measuring equipment and generate lots of data if you can just let the machine run as usual and then fix it when it breaks?

"The job of a maintenance engineer has traditionally been to get a work order for something that has broken down, fix it and then wait for the next work order. But how do we complement that skill set with someone who can proactively look at problems and find faults before they happen? And who can use the technical tools available to track errors and find new solutions?"

Leadership plays a key role in driving change

Leadership plays a key role in driving change.

"In the past, it was often the best technician who was promoted to maintenance manager.  Now we see the need for leaders who can steer an organisation through constant change. Someone who can link the role of maintenance to the achievement of the company's overall strategic goals, challenge their people, explain, embed and motivate their ideas up the organisation and then steer the work in the right direction.

The ability to collect data and work proactively also strengthens the link with the company's sustainability efforts. By extending the life of equipment and optimising energy use, the maintenance organisation can contribute to quantifiable reductions in resource consumption and carbon emissions.

"Poorly maintained machinery often consumes materials and energy unnecessarily. Today's technology makes it easier to find, target and quantify this unproductivity in real time, rather than waiting for the electricity bill to arrive and wondering why it has gone up."

Monitoring and measurement are key

Monitoring and KPIs are a challenge in themselves, often linked to leadership and management's understanding of the maintenance organisation's role in a fast-changing, data-driven world. Camilla Munther advocates a combination of leading and following KPIs:

"There is a big difference between measuring what you do to influence performance (leading) and measuring the performance itself (following). In maintenance today, there is a lot of use of following KPIs, such as Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and Mean Downtime (MDT). By the time you get feedback from such metrics, it is already too late. It is better to find the link between what you do and the result of what you do, so that you can see trends earlier and act on them."

She gives examples of proactive, or leading, KPIs:

Some companies track how many decisions they make based on data to see if they change the way they work or continue to guess and go by gut feeling. So making decisions based on measurable insights can be a KPI in itself, helping to move the organisation towards a more data-driven way of working over time - which in turn makes the organisation better prepared to take advantage of new technological advances as they emerge.

"And why not measure the number of 'wow' moments when the organisation goes above and beyond and does something really good?"

RISE supports the transition

RISE has expertise in everything from sensor technology and data analysis to organisational development to support maintenance organisations in transition.

"When companies come to us for help with data analysis, we often find that the real problem is the organisation. We can then coach them on how to set up their organisation for change and inspire new ways of working that make them competent to take advantage of the technical equipment themselves,' says Camilla Munther. We can help with the whole chain."

She stresses that developing the maintenance organisation is not necessarily about major reorganisation:

"It can be more about developing what we have by changing routines and working methods. The important thing is that the technical and organisational changes go hand in hand."