For more than 20 years I have been visiting maintenance departments to teach them how to use their Maintenance Software and help enhance their processes to reduce costs and increase productivity.
When developing a new process, the most used roadblock I’ve heard over these past 20 years is “I don’t trust them to put data in the system properly”.
These words are usually uttered by a long term employee. Sometimes by the director and sometimes by the supervisor. I don’t know for certain if the reason is insecurity, fear or just control. It is mostly some of each in certain situations.
These excuses, however, are not founded in reality. There are employees in almost every organization that will not enter the information correctly. This may be due to lack of experience, training or concern. Although experience and training can be overcome, the opponents of the change will say that those with a lack of concern will sabotage the system with bad data. This is a true statement. They will enter bad data into the system. But this “bad data” is not sabotaging the system. It is sabotaging their carriers!
The fact is the vast majority of employees want to do a good job. If you will provide the tools and training necessary, you will get good results out of all but a few. Those few will pollute the system with bad data. That is true, however, when the bad data is viewed in comparison to the average the employee’s ill intentions and/or bad work habits are revealed. This offers the data needed to take corrective action. Let’s face it, you already know which employees are going to create these issues. Simply be prepared to take action and resolve the issue.
Avoiding these situations is almost always a major bottleneck to implementing a major time saving piece of the process. Quite often it is moving to a mobile process. The move to a paperless system can increase productivity by 40% and can save about the same percentage in cost by dramatically reducing drive times in addition to other efficiencies. These kind of results should be implemented regardless of roadblocks.
Don’t let a few employees stop you from moving your maintenance technology, process, moral and results to the next level. Implement the new process, review the data and deal with the problems. By taking this approach you will increase the results of your entire team.
