MRO Today - Rising to the challenge

Rising to the challenge

Kenny Coleman (left) and Andy Stroh (right) personify the new face of industrial maintenance. Over 10 years at Bobcat, Stroh has held almost as many jobs, “falling upward” through the ranks, as maintenance manager Rodney Cary humorously puts it.

Coleman, one of Bobcat’s leading maintenance mechanics, has been with the company nearly 18 years and has also held numerous positions all over the plant floor.

Today, as TPM coordinator and MRO buyer, Stroh is learning thermal imaging, oil analysis, vibration monitoring and how to work with Bobcat’s new Oracle ERP system.

“It’s a whole group of tools that I didn’t know existed before,” he says.

A bunch of SOPs
Among their other duties, Stroh and Coleman lead teams that create Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) manuals (more than 20 so far) for PMs on punch presses, robotic welders and machining centers.

“We want to make sure every mechanic understands how to do a proper PM, and the best way we’ve found so far to do that is to make picture-guided SOP documentation for each task,” Stroh explains. “We put them in binders starting with the three S’s; sort, straighten and sweep.”

The Fire Rounds SOP, driven by Coleman, has detailed instructions for doing weekly inspections of fire prevention equipment and fixtures across the entire factory.

“It starts with a map that pinpoints the exact location of every air or nitrogen tank, PIV valve, test drain and waste containment site, and breaks the factory into fire protection zones,” Coleman explains.

The SOP is further broken into weekly, monthly, semi-annual and annual rounds, which are all mapped out to save mechanics walking time.

Each task on the SOP checklist contains a reference number. If a mechanic is not sure what he needs to do, he can check the reference number and flip back in the binder to photo instructions that show the steps required to do the job.

“Their impact is huge,” Coleman says. “Our mechanics don’t have to run all over anymore trying to locate someone who knows what to do, because it’s all right there in the SOP.”

Each SOP also contains a complete list of the tools required for each task.

And, thanks to a new emphasis on PMs, maintenance is now being planned, scheduled and documented more effectively than ever. Posted weekly schedules allow production managers to complete parts runs before their machines must go down.

“We still have emergencies,” Coleman says. “They are unavoidable. But the volume of maintenance emergencies has dropped drastically — I’d say well over 50 percent.”