Tor Idhammar

President & CEO, IDCON, Inc.  Reliability and Maintenance Consultant

an Independent Subsidiary of TRM, Inc.

What does a Maintenance Manager need to be an expert?

Maintenance manager, can you be an expert that your job? What do you need to specifically do to not only manage your team but the maintenance processes at your plant, mill or mine? This three part video series will give you the answers you need to succeed.

There are 3 things that a maintenance manager needs to be an expert.

• Management skills
• Technical skills
• Leadership skills

What do you mean by management skills?

This is the part of the job where a maintenance manager implements the maintenance processes and ensures that the maintenance team is following them. For reliability and maintenance, that includes Preventive Maintenance, Work Management Planning and Scheduling, materials and parts, and maybe root cause. Root cause should be a joint effort with engineering, operations and HSE.

Learn the fundamentals of Results Oriented Reliability and Maintenance Management

What technical skills are needed?

These questions come up, “How much technical knowledge or skills do a maintenance manager need? Do they need to be experts in alignment, balancing, lubrication, or how the equipment works?” In our opinion, the maintenance manager needs to have some technical knowledge, because you can’t support the frontline if you don’t understand what they do and what they need, to do their jobs.

It’s also difficult to create a vision or goals for your team. We aren’t saying you have to be a technical expert, but you should know about the equipment in the plant and their components in order to understand about prevention and condition monitoring. For example, alignment, if you don’t know why it needs to be done, you can’t support the team. Need to learn some equipment basics? Buy our Condition Monitoring Standard books. These standards include the basic principles of equipment.

 

What needs to be avoided?

We’ve seen a lot of maintenance managers running around dealing with today’s latest emergency. For the most part, they should be letting the supervisor’s deal with those types emergencies.

Watch Part 2 and Part 3 of this video series to get even more insight on what a maintenance manager needs to be an expert.

What does a maintenance manager need to be successful?

Reach out to us at AskTRM@trmnet.com if you have any questions or would like to discuss maintenance and reliability consulting or training.