Does one or more of the following statements apply to your operations?

• We don’t have the time or budget for extensive training on new equipment
• We have no formal training process when new operators or maintenance personnel come to the line
• We don’t have the budget to pay for service contracts with equipment suppliers
• We often do not service our equipment at OEM recommended intervals
• When we can, we buy non-OEM replacement parts because they are cheaper
• Our maintenance team simply does not have the bandwidth to maintain production lines the way we feel they need to be maintained

I hope that none of these statements apply to your operations. I suspect, however, that the maintenance conditions described in the statements are not aberrations, but common problems within the industry.

The statements above come down to time, budget, and/or personnel. Maintenance personnel today may feel more like firefighters than highly trained technicians. Available time to work on problems shrinks while the growing complexity of electro-mechanical machines and the number of machines in use increase, leaving not enough hours in a day for small maintenance teams to stay on top of preventive maintenance. Even before the economic downturn, maintenance budgets and headcount were being squeezed. The downturn simply accelerated the trend of cutting staff and budgets.

Until the operations team can put together a compelling fact-based case for senior management’s consideration, the situation will likely become worse. One suggestion would be to work with a select group of suppliers on preventative maintenance and training. Collect data on downtime, throughput, scrap, quality, and overall maintenance costs on those machines. Have a set of control machines that do not receive the extra attention and after six or eight months compare the difference between the two groups. Prepare a cost/benefit analysis and take your case to management.

If service and support professionals want to see positive change in order to more fully contribute to the success of the organization – achieve outstanding uptime, ensure fast changeover, lower waste, work toward highest possible throughout, and stop the bloodletting in budgets and personnel – they must become fact-based service and support champions.

Here’s the question: Do you have the data that indicates that preventive maintenance pays for itself? Vote yes or no. I welcome your comments.

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A number of the equipment manufacturer service managers I speak with are frustrated by the fact they only talk with customers when they experience a problem.

These managers think that machine operators don’t receive enough initial or ongoing training to maintain proper adjustments that keep the machine in spec. They say that end users do not service the machine at recommended intervals which leads to downtime. Some customers, they say, have a tendency to buy cheap replacement parts that not only break more quickly than OEM components, but also cause additional machine wear. Service managers decry the fact that so many customers pass up the opportunity to keep the machines well maintained through preventive maintenance service contracts.

During the sales process

Sales personnel don’t like talking about service because it implies the machine they sell isn’t high quality. Many customers don’t want to hear about service contracts because of the extra cost. Equipment company service managers, uninvolved during the sales process, don’t have a chance to weigh in. Frankly, most may not have the data to back up the cost/benefit ratio of ongoing training and preventative maintenance service contracts.

I suggest that service managers and equipment sales personnel become preventative maintenance contract champions and proclaim at every opportunity the value of those contracts. This advocacy must be fact based in order to demonstrate the positive impacts proper maintenance and training can have on productivity and costs. That means thorough data collection and analysis. Accurate cost/benefit ratios must be integrated into this analysis.

Sales people, customers, and service personnel should come together at the beginning of the sales process in order to chart a course toward lowest-total-cost of ownership and highest uptime and product quality. Without this cooperation, service managers will talk with customers only when they have a problem.

Here’s the question: Do service and sales personnel adequately explain the value of preventative maintenance service contracts?

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Preventive maintenance often resides far down the list of things to do. That seems to be even truer today as the number of maintenance personnel shrinks in proportion to total operational staff. Lately, we’ve seen a number of customers that are having a cascading number of problems all stemming from lack of a consistently applied preventive maintenance.

On the larger and most complex pieces of equipment, there are key components that, if properly maintained, should last the lifetime of the machine – literally decades. Without regular maintenance, however, these components can wear out in a fraction of that time. In some instances, the customers replace these key components with counterfeits, which can wear out in as little as 12 to 18 months. Rather than a machine operating at near peak efficiency for many years through proper maintenance, it instead becomes a drag on productivity and staff resources.

My advice is to start with the strategic pieces of equipment on the packaging line and have the supplier come in and audit the machine’s current condition, identify components that need attention, and set up a preventive maintenance schedule. If you don’t employ people to maintain the machine, have the supplier’s technicians perform regular service, or take advantage of a program where you can send your components back to the manufacturer for maintenance. On average the cost of having an outside service technician come in on a regular basis for a key piece of equipment will be a fraction of the overall expense in downtime and low throughput.

I know that regular maintenance to supplier specifications appears hard to accomplish while trying to run a production facility. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it. They are not. Try devoting some time to work with key suppliers to determine preventive maintenance solutions. Do so and packaging operations will undoubtedly achieve better bottom line results.

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