Maintenance management is a demanding job. A maintenance manager constantly deals with stress resulting from complex maintenance processes, team dynamics, and management pressure. Thus, maintenance managers must have the technical, managerial, and leadership skills to cope with the job’s demands. In this post, we provide effective tips and key steps to becoming the best maintenance manager you can be, leading your team to boost efficiency and performance in your maintenance program.
Effective Tips And Key Steps To Becoming The Best Maintenance Manager You Can Be:
1. Simplify What You Can
Maintenance managers are often constantly buried in paperwork, meetings, emails, reports, or even data entry. If this is the case, you can quickly lose sight of the higher priority tasks like leading your team, being in the field to audit maintenance program implementation, or providing on-the-spot problem-solving.
Simplify Your Maintenance Manager Administrative Tasks
There are a couple of options to simplify your administrative tasks as a maintenance manager. You can either delegate them to your team or use a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) to automate these tasks.
First, you must identify the tasks that take a lot of your time. Then, break that list down into two categories:
- Tasks you have to delegate – The tasks you delegate free some of your valuable time while empowering your team members to execute some of your leadership roles.
- Tasks that CMMS software can handle for you – This tool can greatly simplify your work by automating the creation of maintenance schedules, tracking their completion, and streamlining the overall maintenance workflow.
2. Focus on Only 3 to 5 Maintenance KPIs
Setting goals and tracking their key performance indicators (KPIs) is a valuable way to push your team towards excellence and continuous improvement. Whether your current maintenance department is performing poorly or at top form, there is always room for improvement. Thus, you and your team always have KPIs to identify and aim for.
Unfortunately, most maintenance managers are prone to focusing on too many KPIs. Targeting more than five KPIs at a time can result in you and your team quickly getting lost and making slow progress. Take some time and determine your top three to five maintenance goals. Then, create a plan and push for greater results in those specific areas.
Often, maintenance managers find it difficult to narrow down their maintenance KPIs to three to five. The common reason is that they lack the data that allows them to have visibility into their assets. This visibility or insight is critical to narrowing down asset maintenance goals. This is another useful feature of CMMS software. This software helps collect relevant asset data for focused goal-setting and effective decision-making.
3. Create a Go-and-See Culture
A go-and-see culture means having managers and leaders who regularly go to the field or work area to observe the operations firsthand. Having your asset and maintenance data organized and with accessible KPI reports doesn’t mean you should rely only on that information to make decisions. Making decisions based only on data and KPIs may be perfect 80% of the time, but there’s typically the other 20% that could use a hands-on approach to make the best decision for that asset and the team.
Include “Go-and-See Time” in Your Daily Maintenance Manager Routine
Go and see failures, audit work compliance, and observe problem-solving. Talk to your team about what’s working or not working, and collect the insight that only you can bring to the data by having that in-person experience. Maintenance tools like CMMS software can be configured to accommodate data points collected through a go-and-see approach. Using these tools helps you ensure that the critical information that can come from adopting a go-and-see culture doesn’t get missed ever again.
4. Bridge the Gap with Technology
Management is looking to you to reduce downtime, maintain high revenue, and store valuable information on assets and KPIs. But these demands can be a tall order without the essential tools. Whether you go for CMMS, Lubrication Management Software, or other maintenance management technologies, the benefits of having them greatly outweigh their costs.
With the right technological support, you get accurate visibility into your assets, maintenance processes and costs, and even causes of failure. CMMS software also provides your organization with information transparency wherein your managers and other departments can access the system to pull reports and look for the answers they need, thus further simplifying your workload. With integrations with other management systems like accounting, production, inventory, logistics, and so on, you spend less time pulling reports and answering questions.
Another pro of using technology is that it allows you to integrate with other technologies. You can incorporate the use of sensors or IoT connections to improve your preventive maintenance schedules based on real feedback from assets, for example. Furthermore, cloud-based applications like those created by Redlist are available. Thus, any mobile or web-connected device can let you access information and do your job, whether you’re in the field or at your desk.
Redlist Provides the Support You Need to Be the Best Maintenance Manager
Being the best maintenance manager isn’t about never making a mistake or running a perfect department that never has asset downtime. It’s about always learning from the past and improving where you can.
Redlist’s CMMS and Lubrication Management Software empower you to do this and more.
With a user-friendly and intuitive interface, users of all levels of technological savviness can use Redlist immediately. If you can use an app on your mobile phone, you can use Redlist. While it may feel scary to integrate the use of an app into your department’s process, our implementation team streamlines the process and supports you every step of the way to guarantee greater success. Book a free demo with the Redlist team to learn more about what our software can do for you!
