In the first post I talked about how the transition from one or two shifts to a 24 hour production scheme affects the way we usually manage our maintenance department. This kind of transition demands a change to a more methodological approach focused on preventive and proactive measures.
In the first points I talked in detail about the lack of time to perform definitive repairs, the increase in maintenance costs (and negotiate them during the planning stage of the new shift implementation), the use of predictive maintenance and taking advantage of every available time to perform maintenance tasks.
Following on from this topic, let’s see the next points: Continue reading
Some time ago, I was advising a person in his first steps on a leadership role, and it came up one of the most difficult issues in management, especially for young professionals: you can’t make everyone happy with your decisions.
Having a training plan for your personnel is always a good practice. However, sometimes it’s not possible to find the adequate course because the topic is too specific, the course is not available at that moment or is too expensive.
In the previous post I showed how to solve a simple problem by performing an Analysis of Variance (if you haven’t read it, please click 
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In manufacturing environments, as well as in many other settings, we take actions and modify parameters, procedures and processes to obtain a specific result (usually to improve the situation). In these cases we need to know if the obtained result is a expected consequence of our changes or we’re just observing variations inherent to the population, that are not related to our actions.
Brainstorming is one of the most popular tools used by professional teams to find innovative solutions and ideas. It’s a quite popular technique and I’ve heard many times of people suggesting a brainstorming session to find innovative solutions for difficult problems. However, to be effective, this technique needs to be carefully led. I’ve seen many brainstorming meetings that derived in a disorganised discussion without achieving any concrete results.
Maintenance managers, supervisors and team leaders usually have a perception about their people and most of the time that perception is considered permanent. For example, ‘John’s lack of enthusiasm’, ‘Tom’s laziness’, ‘Kate’s intelligence’ and so on.