MAINTENANCE The First-Line Foreman; A Critical profile

Keith Bowley is a Toronto-based maintenance management consultant. This is

** the first of a 2-part article. **

Miners could be described as people in the business of producing and processing valuable ore as quickly and economically as possible. According to a 1983 study by the Canada Centre for Mineral and Energy Technology, 35%-55% of the cost of this business is expended on maintenance. The man who has the greatest impact on these high costs is the first-line foreman.

Today’s first-line foreman has one of the most difficult jobs in the Canadian mining industry. He is caught between management’s efforts to cut costs and the need to repair equipment often pushed to the point of failure.

Maintenance should be the systematic servicing and repair of plant, equipment and buildings to prevent breakdowns while in use. In mining, apart from dealing with emergencies, this means doing what is necessary to key equipment and plant (so long as it doesn’t interfere with the production target) and then directing attention to the remaining facilities. Achieving this depends primarily on how well the first-line foreman copes with all the demands of his job.

Demands and problems arrive on the first-line foreman’s desk from a multitude of sources, such as:

bProduction supervisors — who can make unrealistic, unnecessary demands if they do not take the trouble to understand how maintenance should be performed. Many production supervisors push equipment beyond reasonable endurance, ignoring the need for systematic maintenance. The result is needless downtime, product loss and high repair cost.

* The foreman’s immediate superior — who imposes timetables, regulations, orders, directions, policies, questions, priorities and report demands. He often does this with little consideration for the foreman’s time, area of responsibility, crew size and other pressures or priorities.

* The maintenance planner — who helps the foreman prepare the administrative details of planning and scheduling repetitive and non-repetitive work.

* The mine manager — who should understand that maintenance controls few of the elements needed to do his multiple jobs and who should be providing clear policy guidelines for maintenance services. If he is not providing such guidelines, he contributes directly to making the foreman’s job more difficult. If the mine manager states categorically that production will take precedence over every kind of maintenance except a bonafide emergency, he can completely disrupt the alignment of any basic maintenance control procedures.

* Personnel, accounting and stores — which force the foreman to take the time to check time cards and prepare warehouse requisitions. He must also take the time to satisfy vacation and overtime allotment and review stores records to advise on re-order points and obsolescence of inventory.

* The safety supervisor — who helps the foreman in his constant efforts to attain the highest levels of safety performance.

* The union — which, in too many cases, is more of a hindrance than a help to the foreman. It is necessary for the foreman to know intimately the terms of the agreement with the union and to endeavor to maintain an equilibrium in the company/union relationship.

* Plant engineering — which uses maintenance labor for construction, equipment modification and equipment installation. Priorities must be applied carefully. Parts, materials, blueprints, etc. should be secured in advance. The project engineer should be available to answer questions while work is in progress. Unless plant engineering can consistently meet requirements of this nature, the foreman must improvise to fill the gaps.

* Industrial engineering — which provides periodic evaluation of crew performance, work methods, standards, etc. with the participation of the foreman.

To say the least, the pressure and demands placed on the first-line foreman create a challenging and often frustrating working environment.

The first-line foreman usually controls a crew of between 10 and 15, and his annual budget is around $1 million, half of which goes to labor. The people he serves usually don’t concern themselves with how this money is spent as long as the plant and equipment function to their requiremnts. They would prefer not to be dependent, but they accept the fact that there are times when special skills are required — sometimes urgently.

The first-line foreman is where the maintenance buck stops. Often that buck becomes very inflated and costly. But everyone grins and bears it, believing there is little else that could be done that would not create higher costs somewhere else. It becomes simply a matter of accepting the lesser of two evils.

After a number of years, there are few crises which the first-line foreman has not encountered several times. If the operation does not have a means of measuring maintenance productivity, as many do not, the foreman is measured on how well he responds to emergencies.

It follows that many first-line foremen tend to gear most or all of their efforts to emergencies. And depending on the number of successes they have, their reputations are often enhanced to the point where it is believed they can bail the plant out of almost any crisis.

The problem arises from how the foreman prepares for emergencies. He does what any sensible person would do in a similar situation. He loads his crew with extra men who are essential only in time of emergencies and he stows away extra parts in every conceivable nook and cranny. This can create an extravagant waste of men and materials and send costs skyrocketing.

When things degenerate to this point, management has no way of assessing how much maintenance should cost. Parts are drawn from the warehouse, held for future crises, and costs are hidden in convenient cost centres. Workload measurements are always suspect in a crisis and the number of personnel needed is unpredictable. Maintenance cost statistics become meaningless. Sometimes they are the cause of faulty judgements which in themselves can lead to unnecessary costs.

This sorry state of affairs is caused, for the most part, by unrealistic demands and by non-existent or inadequate control of maintenance performance and cost. Responsibility for this rests with the mine manager who has not actively concerned himself with how maintenance is controlled and reported.

The duties performed by the first- line foreman are indispensable for the successful operation of any mine. But he can only perform as effectively and efficiently as his backup management group permits him. Keith Bowley is a Toronto-based maintenance management consultant. This is the first of a 2-part article.