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Intensity, Prosperity and Working Smarter
Working smarter is a key to our future prosperity. There is much we can do in the area of maintenance, reliability and their management to contribute.
The recent report by the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity entitled "Time on the job: Intensity and Ontario's prosperity gap" makes some interesting observations. I won't go into them in detail here but I do have a few thoughts. First let's make sure we understand what we mean by Intensity and Prosperity. Intensity is a measure of the number of hours worked per year by our working population. Prosperity is a measure of the annual GDP per person.
The paper notes a gap in Ontario's intensity when compared with similar North American jurisdications - mostly US states. Here in Ontario we simply work less per year - we take more vacation and work fewer hours per week on average. That amounts to over 3 weeks less work per year than the average. That gap accounts for a large portion of the gap in prosperity.
There is no recommendation to increase working hours as a way to close the prosperity gap. In fact there are plenty of good arguments against doing it. The recommendation is primarily to work smarter - do more with less time expended. The hours we spend away from work can (for most of us) reduce stress and help us. For those who have typically lower incomes and less education however, working less increases stress because of the pressures of making due with less income.
We are at the beginning of a period when we will see our workforces shrink through natural attrition. Baby-boomers are starting to retire and there are fewer skilled people entering the workforce to replace them. Our birth rates and immigration are not meeting the demand any longer. We are at a point where we need to find ways of producing as much with fewer people.
In maintenance and reliability we contribute by producing uptime. Our physical assets (plant, equipment, fleets, utilities, etc.) can run longer hours and produce more in a given stretch of time. Producing more helps with prosperity. We contribute by being proactive in our work and avoiding the undesirable consequences of equipment failures. We contribute by identifying the causes of failures and managing them effectively. We also contribute by doing that efficiently - using our time wisely through effective planning and scheduling of work.
Reliable equipment breaks down less. That means fewer repairs, but likely more proactive effort. Since that proactive work is often less intrusive and disruptive to operations it means more uptime. Proactive work, by its nature, is very amenable to planning and scheduling. Planned and scheduled work, performed on schedule without interruptions (e.g.: looking for parts, being taken away for break-in work, etc) is far less expensive and far less time consuming than unplanned work. Since we use less time for that work we have more time to be more proactive. As our workforces shrink we are able to handle to work load because it is actually less than it was before we made the choice to become proactive.
Working smarter in maintenance means becoming proactive and efficient with the use of our time. It will demand less labour in the long run and allow us to accomplish our work with fewer people. It will help close the prosperity gap through increased productive uptime and not through closing the intensity gap by simply working longer hours.
In making this shift to proactive and efficient use of our time we have a better handle on the number of employees we need in maintenance. Instead of hedging our bets by remaining too lean and using contractors or part timers to backfill we can right-size (not downsize) our workforce. We create opportunities for part timers to become full timers and increase their prosperity too.
What's not to like about that?
Of course, if we all wait until the pain is unbearable (see my earlier blog posting) that pain will get much worse than it needs to be.
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