Many corporations have “reduced costs” by mindlessly reducing personnel with no consideration to (or understanding of) how much it costs to let certain people go.
“Any idiot can pour oil out of a can, so why do we need a lubrication tech working at this high pay?” When those big presses stop running due to lubrication errors no qualified lubrication tech would make, the answer may become clear. Sadly, it often does not become clear even then.
You probably have to make the best possible use of an understaffed maintenance department. Here are some timesavers to help you do that:
• Slimmer procedures. Which steps in a given preventive maintenance (PM) procedure are barely useful? Find out by talking with manufacturers, and looking at your own repair history. Decrease the frequency or eliminate altogether.
• Infrared ports. This is one example of a whole area of solutions. If you install an IR port, how many safety and job steps are you also eliminating by not exposing the maintenance tech to live conductors?
• Maintenance kits. If twenty quarterly PMs all require the same (or even similar) materials and supplies, why are you paying people to gather those up twenty times each quarter? See if your electrical distributor will build (and later refill) those kits for you as custom products.