By 2025, the manufacturing and maintenance industries will need to fill an estimated 3.4 million jobs. According to a report by the Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte, 2.7 million of those 3.4 million jobs result from technicians hanging up their hardhats for good.

While other industries will be able to recruit new professionals to replace their retiring workforce, mechanics and technicians in manufacturing and maintenance will retire faster than new recruits can replace them leaving nearly 2 million jobs unfilled. If your organization belongs to either of these industries, it could face a labor shortage crisis if it doesn’t act now.

The labor shortage can be attributed to two main factors – a lack of new technicians interested in the field and a skills gap in those who are.

The Talent Shortage

Today’s education system in America places a much heavier emphasis on preparing students for college than ever before. This perceived lack of options outside of attending college combined with societal tendencies to place a higher value on traditionally “white-collar” work causes many high-school graduates to no longer see vocational schools as a viable option. These factors dramatically decrease the quality and size of the talent pool from which your company can recruit.

The shortage of new, millennial technicians cannot be addressed by any company single-handedly nor will it be resolved overnight. Fortunately, preventative strategies exist allowing you to guard against society’s uncontrollable attitudes and trends. One of the most beneficial strategies is to develop stronger relationships between your company and the high-schools and vocational schools in the community.

Such relationships provide opportunities to recruit and better educate students about the unconsidered advantages of a career in industrial maintenance. Because of a systemic push towards college, many students never consider the advantages of a skilled-labor profession because they are uninformed. Opportunities for on-the-job training, apprenticeships, union membership, and overtime pay are unique to skilled labor professions and can be a major deciding factor to go against the trend.

While societal attitudes and their implications are largely outside of your organization’s control, companies can take proactive measures to address the shrinking size of the talent pool for maintenance and manufacturing industries. Even so, once new technicians are in the door, the industry faces another challenge – addressing the skills gap between retiring technicians and new hires.

The Skills Gap

Perhaps the most valuable asset in any business is the knowledge of your tenured employees. In the face of an impending labor shortage, the question becomes this: How can you maintain this intellectual capital when your most experienced mechanics and technicians are retiring and taking their years of know-how with them?

Capture their knowledge before they retire. Look to better understand the roles that your technicians have been playing and, during their last year before retirement, document the tricks-of-the-trade they’ve developed over the years.

Transfer the knowledge from the old to the new. If the veterans’ knowledge is documented, a transfer can take place to narrow the skills gap that will exist among your new technicians. Include important insights from your seasoned technicians in the procedural documents associated with work orders. That way, the expertise of your old-timers is always in the hands of your newest technicians, even after the onboarding process.

Streamline your work packet creation process. Make it easier for your planners to provide your new technicians with the right documents for the job. Without a third-party solution like AventX Attachment Xpress, planners are forced to open each attachment individually, print them one-by-one, and then finally collate them together into a work packet. Manually completing this process leaves room for error, and inaccurate work order packets can put a technician of any experience level in danger out in the field.

AventX Attachment Xpress automatically gathers attachments with the work order and prints a complete work packet. Attachment Xpress improves documentation availability, such as detailed asset notes from tenured mechanics, and saves your planners time allowing them to focus on improving overall asset reliability and discovering new ways to preserve the knowledge of your retiring workforce.

What’s Next?

• Learn more about AventX Attachment Xpress and how it can help your company take on this labor shortage crisis
• See how AventX promotes safety for maintenance teams
• Get in touch for more information or a demo

To learn more about AventX Attachment Xpress and how it can help your company take on this labor shortage crisis, click here.

The post Are Your Maintenance Technicians Retiring? first appeared on STR Software.

An increasingly popular remedy in maintenance departments around the world has been the adoption of preventive maintenance practices. However, the success of preventive maintenance efforts strongly depends on the precision and accuracy of work order instructions. Version control and the confidence that work order packages in the field are accurate and reflect the latest best practices are of great importance to management and can have far-ranging implications.

One simple way to improve asset reliability and improve confidence in your preventive maintenance program is through the automation of your work order printing with a product like AventX. Here are 3 ways your asset reliability can benefit from this simple switch.

Benefit #1: Easy updates of maintenance instructions

What if you notice that high temperatures at specific points on your electrical motors are often early indicators of equipment failure? With work order printing automation software like AventX, maintenance management and coordinators can amend maintenance procedures instantly and autonomously for all relevant work orders to ensure new processes are followed on the very next iteration without a communication lag. This easy process not only increases valuable wrench time of your maintenance staff, but gives you the confidence that changes are actually implemented in all new work orders and that nothing is lost in the process of working through multiple team members.

Benefit #2: Version control confidence

Eliminate version-control issues by making the printing process easier, so your teams will be less inclined to print standard work order attachments in bulk ahead of time. With easy and fast on-demand work order printing, you can ensure your teams are using the most-up-to-date attachments and maintenance instructions. This ensures continued warranty coverage, may lower insurance premiums, or serve as legal proof against liability or negligence claims in the case of a breakdown.

Benefit #3: Reduce maintenance backlog

A simpler and quicker printing process can free up valuable time to reduce your maintenance backlog and get ahead of the curve with your preventive maintenance efforts. This allows you to get more out of your assets by preventing breakdowns and keep them running at optimal performance. Maintaining your assets in pristine condition not only improves reliability, but can also lead to other cost savings such as:

• lower fuel or energy consumption
• flexibility to schedule maintenance work during low-use periods for minimum impact on production levels
• no rush fees for new parts or repair work

What’s Next?

• Learn more about printing work orders with attachments from Oracle eAM or work orders with media object attachments from JDE E1 CAM.
• Find out more about how automated maintenance work order printing can also improve your wrench time and workplace safety.

The post 3 ways to improve asset reliability with automated maintenance work order printing first appeared on STR Software.

The first seems self-evident: Maintaining complete and accurate work orders ensures the effective and efficient use of skilled laborers’ time. If the work order package has all of the proper instructions, diagrams, parts information, etc. then valuable tradesmen are able to get to work quickly, check off the necessary tasks, and move on. They are not wasting time coming back to the scheduler looking for the correct documentation or worse, stranded in the field unable to complete the task at hand.

Related: Print Work Orders with Attachments Automatically! Learn More

The second reason to strive for complete and reliable work orders is that doing so has implications for the adoption of a proactive maintenance program. When an organization is striving for best-in-class reliability, users must trust and adopt the tools and systems provided to them. A system that exists for its own sake, rather than to add value to the end users’ lives, is the fastest way to turn off even the most enthusiastic supporters. As the primary interface between the planning system and the tradesperson, the work order package is critical to the maintenance of the asset and also conveys the value of the reliability program in itself. In other words, if the work orders are poorly constructed, missing information, and slowing down progress, the system itself appears – and likely is – broken. Users are more apt to adopt and maintain critical data integration processes if they are starting with a good, working system; it makes their job easier and adds value for them personally.

Related: 5 Tried-and-True Tips for Improving CMMS User Adoption

So then, how do we maintain work order integrity?

First things first, the work that goes into your Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) must be the right work! During the webinar, our host gave an example of Preventive Maintenance (PM) instructions that came directly from the OEM and had been inserted into his work order that simply read “PM the machine.” What?! Although this is an extreme example, those instructions didn’t make his job easier nor help the organization ensure the reliability of that asset. Getting the right work into the system is so critical that OMCS International has entire programs around “PM Optimization” and it is a proven game changer for folks who go down that path.

The second way to maintain the integrity of the work order is to make sure that the right work is getting out of the CMMS. Where humans and computers interact, there is always room for error. The best outcome is to automate as much as possible and eliminate opportunities for such errors. For example, an automated work order printing solution makes it possible to:

• control where a work order’s attachments are stored on the system (version control)
• control how/where attachments are included with the work order (process standardization)
• eliminate manual opening of attachments and collating on the printer – two areas where something critical could get missed.

Users of Maximo and SAP have automated work order printing functionality baked into their systems. Unfortunately, users of Oracle’s eAM module or JDE’s CAM for asset management are missing this critical component of their work order creation and distribution process, making it low hanging fruit with a potentially huge impact.

STR Software believes that complete and reliable work orders should not be a “nice-to-have” feature of your maintenance program. Instead, they are critical to the adoption of optimized maintenance and reliability systems. As mentioned, PMO and other auditing techniques can help ensure the quality of the data going into the system. Making sure the tools you have in place are working for you to help you achieve your goals is the other part of the equation.

In your experience, what impact does work order integrity, or lack thereof, play in ensuring asset reliability?

For folks using Oracle eAM or JDE CAM to manage assets, a work order printing solution can add tremendous value by simplifying the printing and distribution of work order packages, helping to ensure that the right work is getting to the right people, at the right time. Click here to learn more.

For more information:

• Maintenance and Manufacturing Teams: Safety in the Workplace

The post How Work Order Integrity Impacts Asset Management first appeared on STR Software.