CME 216

Plant Maintenance and Work Services

UNIT 3 THE MAINTENANCE DEPARTMENT AND THE MAINTENANCE
MANAGER

Joseph X. F. Ribeiro (Ph.D., M. GhIE)

Unit 3 The Maintenance Department and The Maintenance Manager

Unit Objectives
At the end of the unit, students should be able to:

a. identify the importance of the maintenance department

b. identify the structure of the maintenance department
c. identify the roles of the maintenance department
d. identify the importance of the maintenance manager
e. identify the roles of the maintenance manager

INTRODUCTION
In the previous units, we have discussed the need for maintenance and different maintenance strategies
which can be employed. At the center of the maintenance activities is the maintenance department and the
manager who oversees the affairs there; the maintenance manager. In this unit, we will explore the need,
roles and structures of a maintenance department and then proceed to investigate the requirement needed
to be an effective and efficient maintenance manager.

THE MAINTENANCE DEPARTMENT

The maintenance department can be a department within an organization, in our case a plant or
manufacturing company tasked with the responsibility of ensuring components and/or machinery are
repaired and maintained such that the performance of the plant is always optimum.

The Importance of The Maintenance Department

The maintenance department is important for a number of reasons. A few points include:

1. Maintenance strategies and documentation

The department is the custodian of maintenance policies of the organization. The department
houses all the related maintenance documents and implements them accordingly. The department
also contributes periodical reports to the overall reporting structure of the organization for purposes
of archiving. The department is also responsible for making input to purchase of maintenance
equipment as well as acquisition of services for the organization.

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2. Establishment of authority and reporting
Overall administrative control usually rests with the maintenance department, with its head
reporting to top management. This responsibility may be delegated within the maintenance
establishment. The relationships and responsibility of each maintenance division/section must be
clearly specified together with the reporting channels. Each job title must have a job description
prescribing the qualifications and the experience needed for the job, in addition to the reporting
channels for the job.

3. Planning and scheduling

The maintenance department is responsible with planning and scheduling of maintenance in line
with the requirement and expectation of the organization. Planning and scheduling needs to ensure
that business as usual is not disturbed.

The following are key points to plan maintenance:

▪ Identify the equipment for maintenance and technique for maintenance.

▪ Categorize maintenance into routine, priority and emergency.
▪ Plan maintenance considering cost, time, space etc
▪ Material planning for maintenance requirements.
▪ Budget time and money requirements.

The need to schedule maintenance can be best described as follows:

▪ To optimize usage of plant, machinery and tools.

▪ To optimize usage of manpower in maintenance.
▪ To ensure smooth production flow.

4. Manpower
The department provides spaces for its personnel. In the department various offices are allocated
to the personnel to facilitate their work, store their personal belongings as well as equipment used
for their activities. The department ensures that work is well scheduled for staff and also staff are
trained on a regular basis to make them effective and efficient.

5. Education and training

Nowadays it is also recognized that the employers should not only select and place personnel, but
should promote schemes and provide facilities for their further education and training, so as to
increase individual proficiency, and provide recruits for the supervisory and senior grades. For
senior staff, refresher courses comprise lectures on specific aspects of their work; they also

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 encourage the interchange of ideas and discussion. The further education of technical grades, craft
workers, and apprentices is usually achieved through joint schemes, sponsored by employers in
conjunction with the local education authority. Employees should be encouraged to take advantage
of these schemes, to improve proficiency and promotion prospects. A normal trade background is
often inadequate to cope with the continuing developments in technology. The increasing
complexity and importance of maintenance engineering warrants a marked increase in training of
machine operators and maintenance craftsmen through formal school courses, reinforced by
informed instruction by experienced supervisors. The organization must have a well-defined
training program for each employee. The following provides guidelines for developing and
assessing the effectiveness of the training program: • Evaluate current personnel performance; •
Assess training need analysis; • Design the training program; • Implement the program; and •
Evaluate the program effectiveness. The evaluation is done either through a certification program
or by assessing the ability to achieve desired performance by persons who have taken a particular
training program. The implementation of the above five steps provides the organization with a
framework to motivate personnel and improve performance.

6. Labour relations
The success of an undertaking depends significantly on the care taken to form a community of well-
informed, keen, and lively people working harmoniously together. Participation creates satisfaction
and the necessary team spirit. In modern industry, quality of work life (QWL) programs have been
applied with considerable success, in the form of management conferences, work councils, quality
circles, and joint conferences identified with the activities. The joint activities help the organization
more fully achieve its purposes.

7. Incentives
The varied nature of the maintenance tasks, and differing needs and conditions arising, together
with the influence of production activity, are not attuned to the adoption of incentive systems of
payment. There are, however, some directions in which incentives applications can be usefully
considered. One obvious case is that of repetitive work. The forward planning of maintenance work
can sometimes lead to an incentive payment arrangement, based on the completion of known tasks
in a given period, but care must be taken to ensure that the required standards of work are not
compromised. In some case, maintenance incentives can be included in output bonus schemes, by
arranging that continuity of production, and attainment of targets, provides rewards to both
production and maintenance personnel.

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 8. Inventory management
The maintenance department is the custodian of maintenance tools and equipment acquired by the
organization. In this vein, it keeps an asset register, which is a record of the tools in its stores and
the status quo at every point in time. The1 responsibility of this unit is to ensure the availability of
material and spare parts in the right quality and quantity at the right time at the minimum cost. In
large or medium size organizations this unit may be independent of the maintenance organization;
however, in many circumstances it is part of maintenance. It is a service that supports the
maintenance programs. Its effectiveness depends to a large extent on the standards maintained
within the stores system.

The duties of a material and spare parts unit include:

1. Develop in coordination with maintenance effective stocking polices to minimize ordering,
holding and shortages costs;
2. Coordinate effectively with suppliers to maximize organization benefits;
3. Keep good inward, receiving, and safe keeping of all supplies;
4. Issue materials and supplies;
5. Maintain and update records; and
6. Keep the stores orderly and clean.

The Structure of The Maintenance Department

The maintenance department can be constituted using various organizational structures, however, common
structures used include: centralized decentralized and matrix structures.

Centralized

All crafts and related maintenance functions report to a central maintenance manager as depicted in Figure
1. The strengths of this structure are: allows economies of scale; enables in-depth skill development; and
enables departments (i.e., a maintenance department) to accomplish their functional goals (not the overall
organizational goals). This structure is best suited for small to medium size organizations. The weaknesses
of this structure are: it has slow response time to environmental changes; may cause delays in decision
making and hence longer response time; leads to poor horizontal coordination among departments and
involves a restricted view of organizational goals.

1
Haroun A. E. and Duffuaa S. O.

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 Figure 1 Centralized (functional) organizational structure

Decentralized

All crafts and maintenance craft support staff report to operations or area maintenance as described in Figure
2. The strengths of this structure are that it allows the organization to achieve adaptability and coordination
in production units and efficiency in a centralized overhaul group and it facilitates effective coordination
both within and between maintenance and other departments. The weaknesses of this structure are that it
has potential for excessive administrative overheads and may lead to conflict between departments.

Figure 2 Functionally de-centralized organizational structure

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Matrix structure

This is a form of a hybrid structure. Crafts are allocated in some proportion to production units or area
maintenance and to a central maintenance function that supports the whole plant or organization as depicted
in Figure 1.4. The strengths of this matrix structure are: it allows the organization to achieve coordination
necessary to meet dual demands from the environment and flexible sharing of human resources. The
weaknesses of this structure are: it causes maintenance employees to experience dual authority which can
be frustrating and confusing; it is time consuming and requires frequent meetings and conflict resolution
sessions. To remedy the weaknesses of this structure a management with good interpersonal skills and
extensive training is required.

Figure 3 Matrix structure

Outsourcing

It is important to note that the discussion so far has assumed that the organization retains a maintenance
department in-house. This, however, is not always the case. There are cases where maintenance can be
sourced from other companies or a combination of the two employed. The following are criteria that can
be employed to select among sources for maintenance capacity:
1. Availability and dependability of the source on a long-term basis;
2. Capability of the source to achieve the objectives set for maintenance by the organization and its ability
to carry out the maintenance tasks;
3. Short term and long-term costs;
4. Organizational secrecy in some cases may be subjected to leakage;
5. Long term impact on maintenance personnel expertise; and
6. Special agreement by manufacturer or regulatory bodies that set certain specifications for maintenance
and environmental emissions.

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Examples of maintenance tasks which could be outsourced are:

1. Work for which the skill of specialists is required on a routine basis and which is readily available in the
market on a competitive basis, e.g.,: • Installation and periodic inspection and repair of automatic fire
sprinkler systems; • Inspection and repair of air conditioning systems; • Inspection and repair of heating
systems; and • Inspection and repair of main frame computers etc.

2. When it is cheaper than recruiting your own staff and accessible at a short notice of time.

THE ROLE OF THE MAINTENANCE DEPARTMENT

The role or function of every maintenance department is to ensure that all machinery, equipment, and
systems within the plant are always on line and in good operating condition. Additional functions of this
department include ensuring:

Optimum Availability of machinery

As iterated, the primary function of the maintenance organization is to ensure that all machinery,
equipment, and systems within the plant are always on line and in good operating condition. This
is paramount because the production capacity of a plant is partially determined by the availability
of the productions systems and their auxiliary equipment.

Plant Operation at Optimum Conditions

It is not adequate for critical process machinery to be available to ensure acceptable plant
performance levels. The maintenance department (organization) has the responsibility to ensure
that all direct and indirect manufacturing machinery, equipment, and systems are properly
maintained on time so that they will be continuously in optimum operating condition. Minor
problems, no matter how slight, can result in poor product quality, reduce production speeds, or
affect other factors that limit overall plant performance. These should be not be taken lightly; they
should be identified and dealt with the same determination as other major maintenance challenges.

Maximum Use of Resources

The maintenance department (organization) controls a substantial part of the total operating budget
in most plants. In addition to an appreciable percentage of the total plant labor budget, the
maintenance manager, in many cases, controls the spare parts inventory, authorizes the use of
outside contract labor, and requisitions millions of dollars in repair parts or replacement equipment.
Considering that the resources provided to the department are not infinite, one goal of the
maintenance organization should be the effective use of these resources. Maintenance activities

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 should be carefully planned such that implementation is effective and efficient. Basically, to be
effective means work done employs the right tools and techniques. Work described as efficient
leaves behind little or no waste.

Optimum Equipment Life

One way to reduce maintenance cost is to extend the useful life of plant equipment. The
maintenance department (organization) should implement programs that will increase the useful
life of all plant assets. This means that it should employ suitable maintenance strategies, tools and
techniques to make sure that components and machinery within the plant exhaust their design lives
and beyond where it is achievable.

Minimum Spares Inventory

Reductions in spares inventory should be a major objective of the maintenance organization.
However, the reduction cannot impair their ability to meet goals 1 through 4. With the predictive
maintenance technologies that are available today, maintenance can anticipate the need for specific
equipment or parts far enough in advance to purchase them on an as-needed basis.

Ability to react quickly

Not all catastrophic failures can be avoided. However, time becomes valuable when breakdown
occurs. To put this in perspective, every minute that passes by represents significant losses for the
company. The ability to react quickly to the unexpected failure is critical to the maintenance
department and the maintenance organization must maintain this attitude at all times.

Evaluation of The Maintenance Department

One means to quantify the maintenance philosophy in your plant is to analyze the maintenance tasks that
have occurred over the past two to three years. Attention should be given to the indices that define
management philosophy.

One of the best indices of management attitude and the effectiveness of the maintenance function is the
number of production interruptions caused by maintenance-related problems. If production delays represent
more than 30% of total production hours, reactive or breakdown response is the dominant management
philosophy. To be competitive in today’s market, delays caused by maintenance-related problems should
represent less than 1% of the total production hours.

Another indicator of management effectiveness is the amount of maintenance overtime required to maintain
the plant. In a breakdown maintenance environment, overtime cost is a major negative cost. If your

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maintenance department’s overtime represents more than 10% of the total labor budget, you definitely
qualify as a breakdown operation. Some overtime is and will always be required. Special projects and the
1% of delays caused by machine failures will force some expenditure of overtime premiums, but these
abnormal costs should be a small percentage of the total labor costs.

Manpower utilization is another key to management effectiveness. Evaluate the percentage of maintenance
labor as compared with total available labor hours that are expended on the actual repairs and maintenance
prevention tasks. In reactive maintenance management, the percentage will be less than 50%.

A well-managed maintenance organization should maintain consistent manpower utilization above 90%.
In other words, at least 90% of the available maintenance labor hours should be effectively utilized to
improve the reliability of critical plant systems, not waiting on something to break.

THE MAINTENANCE MANAGER

The job of a maintenance manager is often dependent on the size of the organization. Typically, however,
the maintenance manager is responsible for overseeing all installation, repair and upkeep operations of an
organization's facilities. Maintenance managers ensure that their co-workers have the best physical
resources available to complete their duties according to the allotted budget. Additionally, a maintenance
manager will have a solid understanding of plumbing and electrical systems as well as carpentry and other
crafts. Maintenance managers work in a variety of industries including manufacturing, electrical plants and
commercial buildings. Recently, a Bachelor's degree in Engineering or the successful completion from a
vocational school is required for most maintenance managers. Successful maintenance managers possess
deep knowledge of engineering and mechanical concepts and have strong time management and
organizational skills.

Responsibilities for Maintenance Manager

• hire and fire maintenances staff

• manage budgets
• develop and implement a (pro-active) maintenance programme
• draft maintenance reports
• look for new ways, tools and assets to improve productivity and cut costs
• allocate workload and supervise upkeep staff (custodians, janitors etc.)
• manage relationships with contractors and service provider
• monitor equipment inventory (forecast, price negotiation) and place orders when necessary

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 • monitor electrical and hydraulic systems of facilities to ensure functionality
• plan and oversee all repair and installation activities
• maintain maintenance logs and report on daily activities
• ensure that designated buildings, plant and facilities are fit for purpose and to provide proactive
support/solutions when required
• ensure health and safety policies are complied with
• hire sub-contractors for specialized maintenance work
• coordinate the completion of complex repairs

The position of the maintenance manager

The position of the maintenance manager differs from organization to organization. A typical position of
the maintenance manager is presented in Figure 4. In some cases, the role of the maintenance supervisor is
merged with the role of the maintenance manager.

Figure 4 Position of the Maintenance Manager in the overall organizational structure

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Major constraints of the maintenance manager
The major constraints faced by the maintenance manager includes controlling the budget, managing the
time and keeping the staff.

Figure 5 Major challenges experienced by maintenance managers

Aside from those 3, many maintenance managers said that they also run into constraints like:

• working with old equipment

• lack of historical data
• lack of transparency
• spare parts inventory
• top management not being interested in implementing preventive routines
• Keeping track of ongoing maintenance work.
• Putting out fires.
• Finding the time to get day-to-day tasks done without all the interruptions from staff and
operators.
• Team communication with other departments.
• Staffing issues (employee turnover).
• Optimizing the maintenance strategy to have the most uptime with least cost.
• Finding a balance between micromanaging and being hands-off.
• Bringing everyone up to speed with technology (specifically CMMS software) and getting
them to use it consistently.
• Ensuring accurate historical data for problem-solving.
• Budgeting resources for widely varied (seasonal) equipment usage.
• Training equipment operators and technicians.
• Keeping everyone moving in the right direction.

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Skills required of maintenance managers
Top skills required of maintenance managers include:
1. organizational skills
2. the ability to see the bigger picture
3. people skills

Figure 6 Top skills required for maintenance managers

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Unit 3
Trial Questions
Multiple Choice Questions

1. The maintenance department can be a department within an organization tasked with the
responsibility of:
a. ensuring components and/or machinery are repaired and maintained such that the
performance of the plant is always optimum.
b. ensuring components are maintained such that the performance of the plant is always
optimum.
c. ensuring machinery are repaired such that the performance of the plant is always
optimum.
d. ensuring components and/or machinery are only repaired such that the performance of
the plant is always optimum.

2. The following describe the importance of maintenance departments, except:

a. Keeps documentation of maintenance activities
b. Plans and schedules the maintenance activities
c. Makes the overall boss happy
d. Recruits manpower for the organization

3. Education and training of maintenance personnel is necessary for the following reasons,
except:
a. Provide recruits for supervisory and senior grades
b. Increase individual proficiency
c. Increase worker salary
d. Make workers become accustom to new technologies

4. The duties of the materials and spare parts units of the maintenance department does not
include:
a. Keep good inward, receiving, and safe keeping of all supplies
b. Issue materials and supplies
c. Maintain and update records
d. Negotiating with suppliers

5. In this maintenance structure, all crafts and related maintenance functions report to a
central maintenance manager. This describes a … type of maintenance organization.
a. Centralized
b. Decentralized
c. Matrix
d. Outsourced
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6. In this maintenance structure, all crafts and maintenance craft support staff report to
operations or area maintenance. This describes a … type of maintenance organization.
a. Centralized
b. Decentralized
c. Matrix
d. Outsourced

7. In this maintenance structure, crafts are allocated in some proportion to production units or
area maintenance and to a central maintenance function that supports the whole plant or
organization. This describes a … type of maintenance organization.
a. Centralized
b. Decentralized
c. Matrix
d. Outsourced

8. In this maintenance structure, all crafts and related maintenance functions report to an
external maintenance organization. This describes a … type of maintenance organization.
a. Centralized
b. Decentralized
c. Matrix
d. Outsourced

9. Which of the following is not a function of the maintenance department?

a. Ensure optimum availability of machinery
b. Ensure plant operation at optimum conditions
c. Rapid reaction
d. Ensure maximum spares in the inventory

10. Which of the following does not describe the maintenance manager?
a. His work is dependent on the size of the of organization
b. Overseeing installation
c. Ensures co-workers have the best physical resources to work with
d. Pays workers on time

11. Major constraints experienced by maintenance managers include:

a. Working with old equipment
b. Lack of historical data
c. Budget management
d. Team communication with other departments

12. Top skills required by the maintenance managers include:

a. People skills

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b. Verbal skills
c. Analytical skills
d. Computer skills

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Unit 3
Trial Question
Subjective Questions

Question 1
a. You work for a large paper manufacturing firm. Convince your boss that you need a maintenance
department.
b. Briefly describe the importance education and training to maintenance staff
c. Under which prevailing conditions would you recommend outsourcing your maintenance activities?

Question 2
a. Mention the major maintenance organization types.
b. With good illustrations, briefly describe two of them
c. What are the benefits of operating a centralized maintenance department?

Question 3
a. The maintenance department has several roles to play in the organization. To you, what are some
of the important roles and what makes these roles significant?

Question 4
You have applied to DRIED and FRIED, a food company as a maintenance engineer.
a. Briefly describe 5 responsibilities you believe would be assigned to you.
b. Describe where you would be placed on the organizational chart and why?
c. Discuss three major skills which would be required of you and why?
d. Discuss some of the challenges you are likely to face and how you can resolve them

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