Minutemen of Maintenance

Each Labor Day, we pay tribute to the men and women who produce our products, the people who run the machines and assembly lines. But behind each machine and assembly line is a small group that is vital to the production process, yet is classified by accountants as “overhead,” as people who do not add value to the finished product. This group, the maintenance department, deserves our tribute as much as those who work the assembly lines.

Usually housed in some remote corner of the plant, surrounded by burned-out motors, cannibalized machines, and rusting conveyors, the maintenance department keeps an eye on all operations both in the plant and in the offices. Within the department is a collection of master craftspeople: electricians, plumbers, carpenters, pipe fitters, riggers, mechanics and machinists. Diverse in their skills, they work as a unified team, often crossing trade lines.

Elsewhere in the plant, people work a regular eight-hour shift. Not the maintenance department. Members may work an eight-hour shift but they are on call 24 hours. Second and third shift staffs are usually small, performing routine jobs and those special jobs required by the particular shifts. But hidden under a desk pad in the office are the home phone numbers of all the key employees in the department, and those numbers are called often – and at odd times.

Years ago in a Hartford, Connecticut plant, a main electrical distribution panel caught fire at 9:30 at night. The maintenance people quickly extinguished the fire and determined that the punch-press department, a department of 200 day-shift employees, would not be able to work the next day unless the distribution system was repaired. Immediately the calls went out; to the plant engineer, to electricians, to carpenters, to pipe fitters. Within a half hour there were a dozen day-shift maintenance people back in the plant.

They worked through the night, replacing switches, circuit breakers, panels and walls. At 6 a.m. power was turned on; at 7 the 200 members of the punch press department went to work. No one in maintenance had raised any question about whether to undertake the task or not. The plant engineer and his crew had seen the necessity and gone to work. It was just another routine emergency job for the maintenance department.

There are two divisions in the work of the maintenance department; regular work that can be scheduled and emergency work. Any good maintenance department does what every department does: It schedules its work. Unfortunately, the best laid plans of mice and maintenance men “gang aft agley.” Maintenance departments are staffed and work is scheduled for regular maintenance jobs. Emergencies have to be squeezed in with the rest of the work – even on Sundays.

Someone once described manufacturing as “one damn crisis after another”. I’ve always thought that was a pretty good picture of manufacturing, and nowhere within the plant is that truer than in maintenance.

But all of the work of the maintenance department is not exciting or glorious. There are always the clogged toilets – and fluorescent light that is out. For the number of calls to maintenance, all of which have to be answered cheerfully, you’d think an entire department had been plunged into darkness. And if the light is blinking, not out, it is, for those working in the department, a major calamity. A member of the maintenance department answers these calls while still trying to attend to the so-called scheduled work.

“Overhead” are they? A plague on accounting terminology. At the Indy 500, it’s the pit crew that keeps the cars running. So it is in a factory. The maintenance department is the pit crew that keeps the plant running. On this Labor Day, a day on which many maintenance people are actually laboring, I want to pay tribute to all the fine men and women I have worked with in maintenance.

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About the author:

Harvey Gitler is a retired Industrial Engineer who served as executive vice president of a medical instrument manufacturing company. He has been a frequent contributor to business and trade magazines and the Wall Street Journal. He currently writes a weekly column for the Elyria, OH Chronicle Telegram.