So much to do, so little time. Maintenance professionals often feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day. Between repairs, paperwork, and routine maintenance, these employees are often overworked with huge inefficiencies in what they do and when they do it. The average wrench time for many industries is less than 40%, meaning that the technician spends less than half their day directly performing maintenance activities! Let’s get to the bottom of what is really taking up the bulk of their time.
1. Searching for Documentation
Management needs to focus on providing maintenance professionals with tools that will allow for maintenance productivity. One major contributor to wasted wrench time is the time spent searching for documentation. Often, contract employees will be unfamiliar with the software used by different companies. When there is no “common-sense” way to search for processes, equipment, and maintenance documents, employees may waste hours trying to collect and input the data required for their work to get done.
2. Mismanagement
It is a well-known fact that preventive maintenance is preferable to reactive maintenance. It’s cost efficient, prevents downtime and allows for efficiencies in everyday business. Although this form of maintenance is ideal, a lot of managers don’t know how to fully achieve it. Instead, they use what resources they have to solve priority issues, mainly urgent repairs. Planning needs to focus on long-term needs of the equipment and work backward to account for urgent issues. Prioritization and increased quality of the notifications and work orders will help to resolve a backlog of maintenance.
3. Performing the Same Task Twice
Surprisingly this is a common issue, despite there being simple solutions available. Sometimes an employee will not document that they performed a maintenance task such as an equipment inspection. Without this documented, the inspection may be scheduled again and a second employee will end up repeating the task. Busy maintenance employees need a simple and quick way to document the work that they do in their fast-paced work day. Additionally, in a poorly performing CMMS system, the documented maintenance may be unseen and thus scheduled twice. Breaks in communication and missing data are the root cause of this issue.
How Can NRX Help?
Organizations that use the NRX AssetHub platform and its module applications experience increased productivity, increased efficiencies, and cost savings in virtually all aspects of maintenance and operations. At NRX we believe that better data powers maintenance productivity. We have proven this by helping customers to increase wrench time by at least 25% by making it easier and faster for maintenance workers to find information.
Find out more here and stay tuned for the next blog where we will discuss how to improve maintenance productivity by increasing wrench time.
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