Manufacturers can bleed hundreds of thousands of zlotys in areas no one has ever put a number on. The financial statements may still add up while the business quietly loses competitiveness, and in an era of automation the margin for error keeps shrinking.
Tomasz Burnos, consulting director at Operivo, compares a production plant to a system of connected vessels: a breakdown of one machine does not stop at the repair invoice, it spills into production, logistics and sales. The repair itself has its own line in the maintenance budget. Everything else does not.
– A production company works like a system of interconnected vessels. A failure of a single machine does not end with the cost of repairing it, it spills over into production, logistics and sales – said Tomasz Burnos, consulting director at Operivo.
– It is not directly the cost of repairing that emergency stoppage, but the costs connected with lost production, logistics and sales that may be the biggest. Although they are not directly visible in maintenance budgets, they have a direct effect on the company’s overall P&L – he added.
The hour nobody has priced
Few plants take the calculation of a single hour of downtime to its end. The components include the product that was never made, idle operators, wasted material, extra changeovers, overtime after the fault is cleared, delayed transport and, where contracts are at stake, penalty payments. Depending on the sector and on whether the stopped machine is a bottleneck, that hour costs anywhere from a few thousand to several hundred thousand zlotys. Until the figure is known for the critical production assets, a company has no idea how much money leaks through breakdowns.
Paid for a full shift, productive for half of it
The second loss is harder to spot, because it is charged every month regardless of whether the machines are running or standing still.
– If we survey maintenance technicians and execution forces about how they spend their time, we very often find that less than half of the time for which we pay as a company is effectively used to create added value – said Tomasz Burnos.
The point is not that technicians are idle. Their hours go to waiting for access to the equipment, hunting for parts and documentation, circulating permits, walking back to the warehouse and agreeing the scope of work with several people. Wages are charged for the whole shift, while diagnosis, repair and inspection get only a fraction of it. The first measurement usually surprises the board, yet it is the one that reveals where the real reserve of the technical team’s capacity sits.
When costs rise and the quarterly result needs fixing, the reflex is to cut a position. Maintenance is especially exposed, since its costs are immediately visible while the effect of good maintenance is invisible. It takes the shape of failures that never happened.
– Before we start looking for savings in headcount, it is worth checking how many tasks in this department do not increase reliability or reduce risk. How many of them are unnecessary from the point of view of safety or production, and nobody can answer why they are performed – said the Operivo consulting director.
There are badly matched inspections, data rewritten by hand several times, redundant approvals and reports that nobody reads. Removing such activities lowers costs for good. Trimming the maintenance budget does not eliminate those costs, it moves them into the future as expensive breakdowns.
Operivo’s survey asked maintenance staff what would help them most: additional people, a bigger budget, a new CMMS-class system or the removal of unnecessary duties. The overwhelming majority picked the last option.
A shrinking pool of specialists
– The manufacturing industry is struggling with a shortage of specialists, both because of the changing demographic structure and because the education model lags behind market needs. In some technical professions, finding a specialist with the right competences is very difficult, so companies employing long-serving experts have a problem replacing them. Plants in large centres, in Wrocław, the Katowice area or Tricity, are particularly affected. All companies draw from the same limited pool of workers. Recruitment no longer takes a month or two; it often takes more than half a year – said Tomasz Burnos.
When a technician leaves, something that is absent from the manufacturer’s documentation leaves with them: the failure history of a specific machine, familiarity with unusual symptoms, the procedures used to bring production back. Many technical schools in Poland have been closed, so competences are built inside plants. In the best case, a company hires a successor early and gives both generations a period of joint work. The starting point is to identify the machines whose knowledge currently rests with a single person.
Ageing machines, ageing knowledge
Knowledge and equipment grow old in parallel. More factories are going through another phase of automation and digitalisation, and the pace of generational change in the machine park is accelerating. Without a defined operational risk for the production system, decisions about repair, modernisation or replacement are made on intuition.
The age of a device is a signal in that assessment, though not the criterion. What counts is the probability of failure, its impact on production continuity, the time needed to restore operation, the availability of spare parts and whether the manufacturer still services a given generation of the control system. Only a comparison of those factors across all key machines shows where a control retrofit is enough and where a full replacement is justified. Without such a comparison, money goes to the most troublesome unit rather than the most risky one.
An IT system is increasingly presented as the answer to these problems, and Tomasz Burnos points to the trap involved. Software available on the market is meant to help run maintenance effectively, but it requires the way of working to be organised first.
– Digitised chaos remains chaos – said Tomasz Burnos, consulting director at Operivo.
The market offers hundreds of digital solutions for maintenance management, yet without an implementation strategy and staff training a company cannot use the advantage of such a system. If inconsistent machine names, wrong part indices and unassigned responsibilities migrate into the new software, the business gets a digital version of its existing problems.
The questions to settle before the purchase are simpler than the choice of supplier: which decisions will be made on the basis of the collected data, who enters that data and what happens if they do not. Technology speeds up a process that works. A process that does not work gets sped up just as effectively.
Źródło: WNP.PL, Fot. Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock / Mat. pras. Operivo
