Many facility managers find themselves promoted from within. You might have been the best maintenance technician on the team, but this doesn’t mean you were given management training.
It’s easy to feel lost when thinking about the Best Practices for Managing a Maintenance Team. This post covers what you need to create a high-performing maintenance team.
The Role of a Maintenance Manager
A maintenance manager keeps things running. You oversee daily work, but also long-term projects. Day to day, you will work with technicians, supervisors, and planners so you manage resources well.
As a maintenance manager, you are responsible for scheduling and planning maintenance operations. This includes timely maintenance activities and minimal downtime. You’ll also handle open communication so both team members and key stakeholders are always kept in the loop.
You need strong leadership qualities. Technical skills are important for effective maintenance management.
Essential Skills for Maintenance Managers
Strong maintenance managers have a mix of technical abilities and leadership traits. You’ll need to deeply understand the equipment and systems.
You also need soft skills. This could include making fast decisions under pressure and problem-solving skills. Being adaptable to changes that could impact maintenance team’s workflows is also important.
Fostering Team Leadership
A huge component of successful maintenance management will always involve team building. With this, you want everyone on the team contributing to clear goals and fostering collaboration among maintenance workers.
Setting smart goals and sticking to them requires transparency. Management focuses on assigning work orders, adjusting maintenance operations, and supporting a productive workplace. There’s plenty of resources out there, take for example this guide that walks you through best practices that go far beyond goal setting and maintaining focus, including streamlining workflows, and building team support.
Building a Strong Maintenance Team
Bringing together skilled technicians can help give a strong start to any project. Think about what might draw someone to your maintenance team.
Think about growing someone internally or getting outside help. New people and fresh insight can boost your maintenance program greatly. It all depends on having a plan to integrate outside workers.
Partnering with local trade schools for an apprenticeship program could give the advantage to be more involved with the workers future. So the maintenance manager can better incorporate team members on the team.
Hiring Skilled Technicians
When hiring, look beyond just technical skills. Search for people that want to contribute and help improve maintenance practices and workflow.
Look for candidates who fit your company culture. Strong soft skills can show a better quality of character and will mesh better within existing maintenance teams. Strong empathy in leaders always goes far.
Maintenance Training and Workforce Development
Give opportunities for career advancement. Help technicians advance professional development that interests them and grows with their capabilities and skills.
Ongoing training and certification will keep everyone sharp, relevant, and competitive in their positions. When people are learning new things, teams often get renewed excitement, higher levels of productivity, and overall better teamwork. Check online resources like those found at facilitiesnet.com and even coursera.org to get a gauge on what’s readily available for your maintenance departments.
Implementing Preventive and Predictive Maintenance
Proactive maintenance keeps equipment working longer. Frequent inspections and routine maintenance jobs like greasing and replacing old worn down parts helps prevent unexpected breakdowns. All of this reduces wasted downtime so this saves costs on resources while enhancing lifespan of assets.
Predictive maintenance helps with identifying issues. When teams use sensors and monitors on critical equipment, staff get better equipment reliability from each machine. So your company benefits and costs of repair drop substantially.
Advantages of Preventive Maintenance
A strong proactive maintenance plan includes routine inspections and maintenance of equipment. Think ahead. Plan around avoiding shut downs and to minimize downtime.
Well-planned maintenance procedures mean machines last longer and work reliably. Address potential concerns before it leads to total system failure. This improves trust and enhances overall success with the asset performance.
Predictive Maintenance to Reduce Breakdowns
Predictive maintenance uses data and smart analytics. Monitoring systems and digital sensors spot problems early. Repairs can happen before it turns into larger costly fixes.
Early detection with these systems lets maintenance technician repair things during planned downtime. The maintenance team improves on responsiveness to any unexpected failures or issues. Predictive models help boost workplace reliability so it cuts the cost of fixes as you go.
Utilizing Technology for Maintenance Efficiency
Technology changed the playing field. Systems track maintenance work. This data helps show overall team performance, trends in repair tasks, even resource allocation.
This gives teams better insight when breakdowns happen or problems occur. When team members can adapt using this knowledge, the whole crew gets more productive.
Role of CMMS in Streamlining Operations
A Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) helps in the oversight of company work flows. The best CMMS software centralizes things by handling work assignments, scheduling jobs, and controlling your spare parts. Any of these tools help any team do well on time management for critical tasks.
The software logs repairs, monitors downtime, and checks parts on hand. This all allows better analysis.
IoT and AI in Maintenance Strategies
The Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) take technology another step forward. IoT devices talk to one another so any problems within your maintenance program might become detected immediately through these machines, on any day.
AI algorithms look over vast datasets, predict breakdowns, so they make tasks optimized and effective. All of this technology helps your maintenance operations stay modern. So when these systems perform jobs, workers are safer too by following all safety protocols.
Establishing Clear Communication and Workflows
Poor communication within a maintenance department commonly leads to significant costs for your company. Any failure to pass down clear facts about a maintenance task could increase equipment breakdowns.
Poorly communicated changes in assignments also reduces workforce reliability. Clear communication reduces miscommunications and friction between all team members.
Work Orders and Reporting Systems
Solid communication needs clear channels, so any system of reporting, too. Think over the best way to make, adjust, even prioritize work orders and their various requests.
Your crew might appreciate seeing detailed guidelines. Technicians require job specifics to get repair times down. Updates within your Computerized Maintenance Management System can keep communication efficient and in one central place.
Creating an Efficient Maintenance Workflow
Develop normal working processes that staff can easily know and repeat. Take advantage of things like the 5S methodology. Streamlined methods cut mistakes that arise within maintenance projects.
Well planned workflows reduce unnecessary steps so it enhances efficiency on many levels of tasks. Improved coordination helps when doing preventative upkeep or when an emergency comes up that is totally unforeseen. The whole group works much smoother with this practice, day in and day out.
Measuring Performance and Continuous Improvement
Setting, then measuring team Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can boost maintenance operations over time. Use these maintenance metrics to stay aligned to broader plans. Maintenance managers adjust methods by watching for success or weaknesses, regularly.
These data points become insights you need. Share your analysis among the staff so each maintenance technician sees their influence. It is vital for each team member to appreciate that we need one another for the team’s success.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs give insight for judging if your upkeep practices perform to your production goals. Think on metrics for gauging task execution success rate, repair response periods, and any cost metrics you want tracked. Using a computerized maintenance management system helps capture maintenance history with each project.
This info turns actionable over time, so its very value lies in future-proofing systems and workflows within maintenance departments. Mean Time To Repair shows you trends with certain issues that regularly delay projects.
| KPI | Description | Formula |
|---|---|---|
| Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) | The measure of reliability or the average amount of time that elapses between equipment failures | Total Uptime / Number of Failures |
| Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) | How long it takes to repair a specific failure once detected | Total downtime / Number of Repairs |
Another relevant data metric becomes Planned Maintenance Percentage, or PMP. This measures a huge variety of critical indicators. You could find there’s a need for ongoing support for employee professional advancement to handle tasks.
Continuous Improvement Strategies
Commit to frequently refining operational processes. Make sure maintenance systems don’t grow stale so improvements carry over through decades, over workforce changes, or in any equipment and plant system revisions.
Gather feedback among your workers, because it shows trust and transparency. Technicians appreciate having direct communication to company decision-makers. It might be good to check online content that can take your understanding of teamwork a bit deeper by viewing content available from various websites, such as ClickUp.
Best Practices for Managing a Maintenance Team
Sticking to a defined maintenance strategy when guiding maintenance groups needs staying aligned with the broad aims set for your company.
Think broadly. Make a collaborative atmosphere to grow morale. Show workers each decision supports one another and strengthens each area within your operational facility.
Conclusion
Strong maintenance leadership grows efficiency and builds reliability among work teams. Set very transparent workflows with clear communication.
Prioritize routine servicing with detailed monitoring plans. Take advantage of all technology as it emerges for data collection or advanced reporting capabilities to better support company aims. Using all this together, among skilled and competent maintenance crews supports the Best Practices for Managing a Maintenance Team.
