In light of the recent zombie-like attacks by people in Miami under the influence of “bath salts,” along with Hollywood’s resurrection of the creatures in film, where the dead run amuck, causing alarm, attacking citizens, consuming the innocent, and converting more along their death march to dominance, we have realized that we have a much bigger calamity to contend with in industry. Yes, we have our own maintenance zombies to combat.

How do we get rid of dead maintenance practices that are continuing to wreak havoc? How do we rise up and fight reactive maintenance zombies who continue to perform the same old dead approaches of previous generations of workers? As companies are striving to compete in a volatile global marketplace, how do we revitalize maintenance departments and reap the profit potential? Face it. Many companies continue to perpetuate the same worn-out approaches to reactive maintenance, not fully utilizing or even implementing a CMMS. Many of the workers may have worked in their jobs for more than 20 years, but instead of growing or doing new and advanced activities, they only do the minimum and they don’t strive to grow or develop proven modern proactive maintenance and reliability strategies.

Amazingly, 12 years into the new millennium, many major companies either have not implemented a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) or aren’t getting the expected value from it. As opposed to being able to have complete maintenance records, performing routine PM schedules, tracking and managing MRO inventory stores and strategizing better paths forward, many companies’ maintenance staffs will wander aimlessly without direction or purpose and just react to the latest emergency request. If you follow the CMMS three pile-process, you can easily decimate this portion of your maintenance zombie-land. This is easy and will provide the foundation for organizations to move from reactive to proactive maintenance management.

The first step is to start documenting every maintenance activity your staff does on your major pieces of equipment. Don’t worry about the fans in the bathroom, yet. Focus on the critical equipment. If you don’t have a CMMS, try a free one for now, or just compile data in a notebook. Please don’t get distracted by the latest bells or whistles in an overabundant world of CMMS development. Just document all of your activities for now. Remember the best CMMS available is the one you use.

After you have performed, documented, and collected a month’s worth of work on your company’s critical equipment, set up a Friday-afternoon maintenance staff meeting. Once you have assembled your team, print out all of the activities that your department has performed on critical equipment.

Put that stack of completed work orders on the conference room table and start the process of setting up three stacks of work orders.

• Stack 1 is the work that could be eliminated completely if you performed a periodic inspection or preventive maintenance activities.
• Stack 2 is work that could reduce the consequences if you performed a periodic inspection or preventive maintenance activities.
• Stack 3 is work that you have to respond to reactively and will occur regardless of whether you perform an inspection or PM.

Ok, now you and your team have the fun work of going through stacks 1 and 2 and developing the PM procedures and intervals to schedule events in your CMMS.

Don’t do this independently. The more input your team has on the front end of this process, the more support they will give you as they do the work, thus revitalizing a sense of purpose and commitment to keeping proactive maintenance processes alive.

Hope that your team kills more mindless maintenance zombies and revitalizes your department!