Have you been to southeast Asia? If not, you may want to try to visit as it a great location for westerners to visit and do business. I recently spent a week there providing a Maintenance Crisis Workshop and prepared the 23 attendees to take the Association for Facilities Engineering Exam. Participants were from semiconductor plants, food processing, healthcare, automotive and plastics industries. To my chagrin learned that Malaysia is also experiencing a Maintenance Crisis.

You might have reactive maintenance zombies if:

Your CMMS System is not producing scheduled work.
You don't have a Maintenance Planner.
You haven't formally trained your workforce.
The UPS or Fed-Ex driver has worn tire treads in your loading dock area.
Over 60% of your work is unscheduled.
You have more downtime than uptime on critical money making machines.
Your company is so lean that you do not have a future workforce developed.
Run to failure is the company mantra.

We are about to share some of the latest research and efforts to fight the reactive Maintenance Zombies but first we want to hear from you.

What are you doing to move from reactive to planned maintenance?

Typically, in a zombie-land reactive maintenance world, if you ask eight staff members to perform the same task, that task will be conducted eight different ways and none of those eight ways may be correct and several may lead to more downtime, safety violations, and perhaps loss of life or dismemberment.

This blog is not for everyone. Especially the faint of heart, the self satisfied and the too lazy or too close minded to consider new ideas and approaches.

If you are too sensitive to read the unflinching truth about the bad, and the ugly sides of maintenance profession, and steps to convert the maintenance function to good and productive, this blog may not be for you.

Growing versus Aging Businesses

Growing organizations that want to grow and advance need consultants to show them proven pathways, avoid pitfalls and help accelerate successful outcomes.

Maintenance zombies are everywhere. Here's one tactic for keeping them out of the CMMS. Set up a CMMS three-pile process.

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.

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.

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.