Performance in focus: the challenges facing maintenance engineering

RS has recently released its 2024 Maintenance Engineering Report in conjunction with the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE). This is based on survey findings that aimed to uncover the challenges facing the profession and its priorities. The Manufacturer Editor, Joe Bush, caught up with one of the report’s key contributors, Richard Jeffers, Solutions and Technical Director, RS UK & I, to find out more.

RS’ survey drew responses from almost 400 maintenance professionals based in the UK and Ireland, working in job roles such as maintenance engineer and engineering manager. Most respondents came from hands-on or operational roles, working in sectors including facilities and intralogistics, manufacturing, energy, and oil and gas.

Key areas covered in 2024

RJ: We’ve been producing the MRO report for a number of years as it’s important to us that we understand the needs of our customers – particularly from the areas of maintenance and engineering – and how those needs change over time. It represents a fantastic opportunity to get first-hand feedback into the needs of existing and potential customers.

It’s a broad-based report and covers a variety of topics from the demographic and recruitment challenges in engineering, to the use of data and the maturity of preventative maintenance strategies – all the areas you’d expect as a maintenance manager.

We’ve seen some recurring themes around the challenges of moving out of a reactive world and into a more planned and preventive culture. And again, we’ve recognised the recurring issues of talent and resourcing, and harnessing correct and accurate data in order to drive a maintenance strategy.

Comparisons from last year

What’s been really great to see this year is the younger demographic that have responded to the survey. However, I always find the lack of take up of technologies such as computerised maintenance management systems (CMMS) astonishing. It’s not a new piece of insight, as it is a regular finding from each year’s survey, but it’s no less surprising in this day and age.

I’m also shocked by the challenges that still exist around moving out of a reactive culture. We’ve known how to conduct effective maintenance since the advent of reliability centred maintenance in the 1970s, so we don’t have to research the right way to do it. The knowledge is there, but the hurdles come from getting the cultural and behavioural change to drive high reliability and availability out of production assets.

Challenges for maintenance engineering

The variety of challenges facing the sector over the last few years are widespread and well-documented. One that does seem to be easing however, is supply chain. For example, across our procurement related research we’ve seen more availability of MRO and electronics components than there were in the marketplace a few years ago.

Sadly, we’re now into the second year of the challenges associated with the war in Ukraine and we also have the ongoing situation in the Gulf. However, it seems the world has found a way around those ongoing challenges.

What is alarming is the large percentage of manufacturers (over 4 in 10) that still rely on reactive maintenance strategies. As mentioned earlier, the underpinning theory of what makes a good maintenance strategy is well understood.

However, challenges still exist around actually making sure that frontline maintenance managers understand that theory. If you’ve come up within one organisation – maybe through an apprenticeship – and you’ve not been exposed to what good looks like in a broader maintenance world, it can be difficult to break out of that particular cycle.

Secondly, and as also mentioned previously, being good at maintenance does require a cultural and behavioural change within the organisation to focus on the leading indicators of failure and those activities that are going to prevent it; rather than what happens today, where all the focus and effort is on the activity that restores the plant after the failure has already occurred.

Rather than just allowing assets to run to fail and then respond to that failure, manufacturers need to be proactive. Rewards, either emotionally or financially, for keeping operations on an even track, need to be at a similar level as they are for the ‘heroes’ that come in, fix and restore the plant after it’s failed. This change is not complicated, but it’s hard.

My main sector is food and beverage, and one I track closely. That is still a pretty tough environment due to inflationary pressures. Two of our customers in this arena are facing significant challenges due to the very bad weather at the start of the year, giving rise to major raw material price inflation.

There are also additional burdens around energy inflation. It’s variable and goes up and down, but it’s not going to go away. If I look back to the price per kilowatt hour of energy when I was running breweries, and compared it to now, it’s a multi-million pound on-cost to a business. So while the headline rate of inflation might be slowing, the yearon- year, relentless increase in raw material and energy prices is still very much an issue.

What really shocked me in the survey results, however, was the drop in energy management as a concern, compared to last year. That’s certainly not representative of the conversations I have with senior engineers at our customers. Whether that motivation around energy is driven by carbon, pound notes, or both, it is increasingly higher up the agenda for most of the senior engineering leaders that we engage with. So, the fact that energy management seems to be less of a prominent concern in the survey than it has been previously, was a little surprising.

And of course, there is the issue of talent. I’m now in my third decade of work, and for my entire career, the challenge around recruiting talent has always been there, despite going through peaks and troughs.

We’re actually starting to see the impact of some of the policies and strategies that were put in place 15-20 years ago, flowing their way into the workplace. The decision in the late 1990s to deprioritise HNCs, HNDs and apprentice training, in favour of degree training for example.

The students who would have undertaken engineering apprenticeships at that time, are now not coming through into those mid and senior level engineering roles. It’s fantastic to see the recent resurgence of high quality apprenticeships, but they are going to take time to come into the workforce.

Data maturity

There is a growing gulf between businesses that make use of technology – such as CMMS – and those who continue to use either Excel files or paper-based records. There’s a whole range of really good quality, fairly easy to deploy, high capability CMMS platforms out there, so I’m constantly surprised that deployment is not more widespread.

Almost all systems are now cloud-first, so they are becoming increasingly easy to onboard. Managing maintenance through an appropriate database tool is so much more powerful than using an Excel spreadsheet. And I would encourage any maintenance functions that are still battling with Excel spreadsheets to look at those easy to deploy cloud-based CMMS platforms.

Despite the fact that the potential of data is clear for all to see, issues still persist around data quality. This is because maintenance data is quite often more difficult to get your hands on than operational data. Normally operational and quality data is being recorded in a SCADA platform, so it becomes easy to pull out and establish a single source of the truth.

However, if you’re looking at data associated with component failure – involving mean time to repair and mean time between failures – then it’s quite often analysed on an offline system. That creates an environment for debate around whether it is a genuine maintenance failure, a setup failure or an operator induced failure.

And because of that debate, the data then becomes less valid and people start challenging what it is saying, rather than responding to the numbers.

Data skills is also an extension of the broader issue around the talent pipeline in the sector. The ability to interpret, analyse, slice and dice data is absolutely critical and to some degree, everyone is tackling that data skills challenge.

Indeed, large data sets very rapidly move beyond the capabilities of an Excel file. So, we need to be encouraging citizen data scientists – people who have day jobs associated with reliability, quality or production – and equip them with the right tools to do more with their data. And there’s some fantastic tools around; we’ve just got to furnish more people with the skills, competence and confidence to manipulate data and analyse it using the tools available.

In addition, it’s not just a case of how things are being measured. What is actually being measured is just as important and is driven by maturity. As such, it can tell us a great deal about where an organisation is on the journey.

I’ve been to factories where practically nothing is measured; merely what comes off the conveyor belt at the end of the line. On the other hand, I’ve also seen operations that are knee-deep in data which is being used at every work cell to drive performance.

If you’re in a process industry there are some fundamentals that you need to be tracking such as overall equipment effectiveness, to understand availability, quality and performance of an asset. And labour productivity, in terms of both production and maintenance data.

On top of that, I’d want to start looking at mean time to repair and mean time between failures from a maintenance perspective, which will tell me about the effectiveness of what I’m doing. The next level after that is to start to identify your leading indicators which will be able to tell you when an asset is going to fail.

A robust condition monitoring programme for your critical assets will give you a glimpse at what will happen in the future, rather than telling you what’s happened in the past.

Downtime

Avoiding unscheduled downtime is a key driver for maintenance engineering professionals. An organisation that is up to speed will be measuring its downtime at every stage, and will be rigorously putting structured improvement programmes in place.

Sadly, however, there are still many manufacturers out there who are very reactive, and just respond to failure rather than learning from it. If you really want to start driving a reduction in downtime, a fundamental culture of learning needs to be in place in order for changes to be made to eradicate that downtime going forward.

With the advance of ever more sophisticated technology, you may wonder why unscheduled downtime is still so commonplace? The truth is that there is a real lack of understanding around condition monitoring and those leading indicators of failure.

If you were to take the analogy of the cars we drive, none of us would consider keeping a car on the road after the oil warning light had come on. Because we know the light is an indication that the car could be on the verge of a system failure, and it needs expert attention to rectify the problem. And of course, we have statutory inspections through MOTs to drive that.

Sadly, this same ethos is not consistently deployed within many manufacturing businesses. And there’s still a debate within the sector around the value and the cost benefit of condition monitoring.

In addition, the age of an asset is not as important as the care being taken over it. The concept of replacing an asset just because it’s hit some mythical financial age is totally erroneous. It should only be replaced when the cost of maintenance and operation is disproportionate to the cost of regeneration or replacement.

The oil sector, for example, is one that’s been grappling with the challenges of managing ageing assets for many years, and the research that’s been done by the likes of Petrochem, can easily be applied to other sectors to learn lessons and extend the life of assets beyond their original design life.

A solution that many manufacturing organisations are beginning to turn to when it comes to maintenance is outsourcing, and I have three simple rules in this regard.

Outsource because it’s genuinely cheaper, which is not always the case; because of peaks and troughs in demand; or because it’s a specialist skill that you’re unwilling or unable to have in-house.

If you’re a relatively small business and want to drive high levels of reliability, you probably don’t have the depth of capability within the organisation, so looking for a partner to do that for you is absolutely the right thing to do.

However, for large manufacturing sites with a highly skilled maintenance team, it may make more sense to bring that capability in-house and have any change programme internally managed.

How can RS help maintenance professionals?

We’re an industrial distributor, so we are always there to help our customers with their MRO supply challenges, in terms of our inventory and procurement solutions.

However, we also have some much more tangible solutions for our maintenance customers. We have a condition and energy monitoring team, plus a host of product specialists who can offer application advice.

We’re always willing to have conversations with maintenance professionals. And we always enjoy trying to connect maintenance professionals together to share best practice between customers.