Topics

Maintenance and Reliability teams face difficult challenges in driving strategic change within their organisation. Defining the value of Asset Management, ROIC (return on invested capital), speaking the language your finance team understand, building relationships with consultants and advisors, and effectively employing the ISO 55000 standards are some of the main topics mentioned.

The ability to accumulate data has increased over recent years due to advances in digital technology, improved monitoring capability and ever-expanding fields within Asset Management systems and data bases. But what are we doing with it? It’s universally agreed that data is critical for the business to optimise these assets. But bringing it all together from disparate systems, presenting results in a valuable way to drive decisions and better business outcomes is more challenging.

The workforce is aging. Many older members of the community are leaving. Organisations are struggling to attract new talent, never mind top talent. So how are they going to cope with this transition, while at the same time being confronted with one of the most significant workforce challenges ever faced. The increase in automation and decarbonisation and climate targets reshaping the landscape of future job roles and required skill sets. Organisations must become more imaginative in their strategies to overcome these challenges.

Since emerging out of COVID many organisations report a drop in the quality of basic, solid work management fundamentals. We must get back to basics, understand and adhere to the fundamentals in maintenance planning, reporting, scheduling, work execution, spares management, and performance assessment and management. This extends to the integrity at which we are executing maintenance work, and therefore the condition and health of assets declining.

It’s a once in history challenge. Maintenance and reliability leaders are essential in helping organisations navigate the transition to a more sustainable and climate-resilient future. We need to create a skill-base able to cope with new technologies while complying with a changing regulatory landscape in the context of decarbonisation and aggressive targets.

Creating a healthy environment for your workforce is a significant challenge for our community. How we implement some practical and scalable strategies to cut through the complexity of the mental health landscape. Not easy when faced with increased work demands, skills shortages and performance pressure. We’re all looking to create a successful mental health environment based on key principles such as risk assessment, job design and workload management.

In all five groups there was consensus for the need to modernise IT and data systems to better align and integrate safety, risk, and Asset Maintenance plans. Without tight integration, different departments and teams operate in silos, leading to fragmented decision-making.

There is ongoing strong sentiment for the lack of attention to, and appreciation of, both the reliability function and the engineers responsible for equipment reliability. This extends to the reliability engineers themselves being often overlooked and misunderstood. This can be due to a lack of understanding of the value they bring or a failure to recognise their contributions. Rigorous reliability processes, role clarity, and clear accountability structures that align with the broader company strategy are essential components of reliability success. So is reliability engineering talent management and development.

Diversity within the workforce is proven to drive higher performance teams. It creates a more dynamic and resilient workforce, prepared to meet the challenges of the future, driving creativity, improving problem-solving, with low attrition and higher employee satisfaction and enhancing overall team performance. Maintenance and Reliability leaders want to play a greater role in promoting a successful EDI ethos in their workforce. To do so requires developing a certain skillset. The community asked about the skills, tactics, and programs they could adopt to attract and retain a diverse workforce in a sustainable way. The community is interested in learning about programs already in place across the industry, helping them achieve successful.

As asset-intensive companies embrace digital transformation, technological breakthroughs in asset management are reshaping maintenance and reliability paradigms. In most cases, we need to respectfully temper the enthusiasm for the next shiny object and focus on getting bang-for-your buck or solving a pressing business need. It was generally agreed that great use cases and good business outcomes are the exception rather than rule.