quote:
Originally posted by Rolly12:
Have you ever wondered which I'm sure most of you have the feud that exists between operations and maintenance.
I've been reading this thread and it seems like there are many different experiences out there, which is to be expected. In my particular situation, I am a one-man maintenance department for a small (6 lines) plastic extrusion plant. I report directly to the plant supervisor, so I don't work for operations per se, but I certainly see the source of that suggestion, because we certainly have to work with them and around them. I have personally been reluctant to include the operations staff in maintenance operations, even though it would be nice to offload some of the work to give me more time to plan things, because more often than not whatever they touch gets wrecked. This plant has three shifts, so there's no avoiding them.
From my point of view, my job exists for two reasons - firstly to do preventative and predictive maintenance, and secondly to fix their many and multitudinous screw-ups.
The way productivity is measured at this plant doesn't penalize for downtime, so they have no need to care. Their line can be down for 5 hours, and they can sit around and drink coffee and at the end of the day they will have their 85%+ productivity numbers and no repurcusions. That's not to say that none of them care, just that they don't _have_ to.
It's in my best interests to try to work _with_ them because I need solid information when I'm looking for the source of a failure, and sometimes I need help removing a large belt-guard or moving a piece of equipment so I can work on it (remember, I'm a one-man show).
At this company (of which there are almost two dozen factories) I'm a bit of an anomaly... I'm actually a licensed millwright doing maintenance. Unheard of! Most of the supervisors started out as guys on the line who worked there way up over the decades. The guy training me in plastic extrusion is very good - very very good. He knows what needs to be how hot, and what will happen if it's not hot enough (or too hot) but he's never had any formal training - no theory. He doesn't always know the _why_ of things, but he gets by famously by using experience and common sense, and I respect that. Since the maintenance guy is an ex-operations guy, and the plant supervisor is an ex-maintenance guy, then in theory they should know how their jobs mesh together, and work together accordingly.
I don't know if they're successful all the time, but it seems to work okay in general.
My biggest beef is equipment being overloaded. We've got a 100HP grinder to chew up plastic scrap for re-processing, and it gets lugged as a matter of course. That's somewhat unavoidable because the grinder is self-feeding. The big band saw gets stalled on almost every cut. You ask them to take it easy... I mean, they've got like 3 minutes between cycles, and it takes 30 seconds to make the cut properly, so why do they _need_ to burn out the motor by trying to get the cut done in only 20 seconds? Yes, when this motor dies (soon, I think) I will try to put on a larger one, but it still irritates me.
To sum it up, I expect I will always be annoyed when other people make my job harder by doing something that is unnecessarily hard on the machines. I don't think it has reached the point of 'mortal enemies' here, though.
Mike