People Readiness: Same Job Title, Different Machine

(upbeat music) - Good day and welcome back to Maintenance Break. Bite size insights, one break at a time. I'm Pete. - And Andrew and Pete, we're continuing our series on operational readiness today. Last episode we introduced the three lenses, people, systems and equipment. Today we're going deep on the one that often gets the least attention before new assets arrive, people. - And when we say it gets the least attention, we don't mean sites ignore training. Most sites do some form of training before a new fleet lands. The problem is what they don't do. They don't make the foundational decisions that determine whether that training even makes sense. - That's exactly it. And to show what that looks like in practice, let's set us same. - A large open cut operation is replacing their ageing diesel mechanical drive haul truck fleet with an electric drive machines, big investment. The business case is solid, better fuel efficiency, lower emissions profile, improved diagnostics capability, leadership signs off, the order goes in. - And from a production standpoint, the logic stacks up. - It does, but here's what happens on the maintenance side. - The existing crew, experienced capable people, have spent years maintaining mechanical drive systems. They know those trucks. And then 12 months later, a fleet of electric drive machines rolls on to site. And the maintenance team is looking at a completely different animal. - Same job title, different machine, different skill set required. - And the site didn't see it coming or more accurately didn't act on it early enough because this isn't just a training problem. It's an organizational design problem. And that starts with a decision that should have been made before the purchase order was even raised. - The operating philosophy. - Exactly. And this is the decision that shapes everything else in the people lens. Before you think about head count, before you think about training, before you think about who's on day shift and who's on nights, you need to answer one question. How is this fleet going to be maintained? - Walk us through the options, Drew. - At one end, you have a fully internal model. Your own team, your own knowledge, staying in the business. At the other end, you have a mark, a maintenance and repair contract, where the OEM or a specialist contractor takes responsibility for maintaining the fleet to an agreed performance standard. And then there's the hybrid model, which is somewhere in between, a lean, permanent, internal team that carries the institutional knowledge, topped up by contractors during peak demand or major scheduled work. - And each of those models has fundamentally different implications for how you staff, how you train, and how you build your maintenance strategy. - That's the bit people mispeak. The operating philosophy isn't just an HR decision. It feeds directly into the maintenance strategy itself. Running a mark, the contractor brings the technical depth. Your internal role shifts to oversight and performance management. Running an internal model, that technical depth has to live in your people. The training, the procedures, the skills development, all of it has to be built to a higher internal standard. - And if you haven't made that decision before the maintenance strategy is written, you end up building a strategy against assumptions that don't match the org model you actually run. - Which is exactly what happened at our composite site. The maintenance strategy was written assuming an experienced internal team with deep asset knowledge. What the site actually had was a lean, permanent crew supplemented by rotating contractors. Good people, but no asset-specific experience and no structured handover to build it. The first few scheduled services ran long. Work quality was inconsistent and the reliability data from those early months was effectively useless because the work wasn't being executed to the standard the strategy assumed. - And that's a cost problem that compounds fast. Longer service times mean the machine is off the go line longer than planned. Inconsistent execution means you can't trust your condition data. And when you can't trust your condition data, your whole predictive maintenance approach falls apart before it's even started. - And the performance impact isn't just in those first few services. If the foundation is shaky, if the team doesn't have the skills or the ownership of the strategy, it takes months to stabilize. That performance gap we talked about in the last episode, a significant portion of it lives here. - So once the operating philosophy is defined, once the org model is decided, what's the next step? - Organizational design. And for a fleet replacement specifically, this is where you have to be honest about the skills mix because this is where the electric drive transition catches sights off guard. A traditional diesel mechanical drive truck is predominantly a mechanical asset. Your maintenance team is weighted toward fitters. Electric drive changes that equation. HV requirements and more electrical complexity on the machine means more electrical competency required in the team. - Correct, high-voltage systems, complex control architectures, onboard diagnostics that require a different level of technical literacy to interpret and act on. A fitter who is outstanding on a mechanical drive truck isn't automatically equipped for the electrical systems of its replacement. And the same shift is happening in fixed plant. The move from fixed speed equipment to variable speed drives and PLC controlled systems has been creating the same skills mix challenge for years. The technology changes, the org structure has to follow. - And if you don't map that skills gap before the fleet arrives, you find out about it during the first breakdown at two in the morning. When the only person on site who knows the system is the OEM tech rep on the other end of a phone call in a different time zone. - We've all seen that. - Too right. So the skills gap analysis has to happen early. Who do you have? What do you need? What's the plan to close the gap? Whether that's retraining existing people, recruiting or structuring the contractor component of a hybrid model to cover the shortfall during the transition. - And there's another layer that gets overlooked. Leave coverage. A lean internal team sounds efficient until someone goes on leave and suddenly you've got a skills gap in the middle of a scheduled major service. - That's where the hybrid model design matters. If your permanent team is lean by design, the contractor component isn't just for peak demand. It's structural. Who covers leave? Is there a preferred contractor arrangement? Are those contractors trained on this specific fleet? Or are you starting from zero every time a new face shows up on site? - Which brings us to asset-specific handover and training. Because even with the right org model and the right skills mix, if the people doing the work haven't been properly introduced to this specific machine in this specific configuration, in this specific operating environment, you've still got a gap. - And this is the part that often gets substituted with a vendor presentation and a stack of OEM manuals, which is a starting point, not a finish line. Classroom training gives your team the theory, the system architecture, the safety requirements. But the first time they open an access panel on a machine they've never worked on, following a procedure written from a drawing rather than from the machine itself, that's where the gap shows up. - And this connects directly to what we talked about last episode. The 80% you can prepare from documentation, experience, and OEM knowledge. It's valuable, it's essential. But the final 20%, the real assets-specific knowledge only develops once your people are working on that actual machine in the field, with the time and the support to build that understanding properly. - Which is why the handover period matters as much as the pre-arrival preparation. It's not enough to train people before the fleet arrives and release them on day one. The early weeks need structure. OEM support on site, experienced supervision, time in the schedule for the team to build confidence on the asset before full production pressure is on. - Because if that period gets compressed, if production pressure means the team is running at full pace before they're ready, the mistakes made in those early weeks define your reliability picture for the next 12 months. - All right Pete, let's land this one. - Here's this week's break tip. Tomorrow morning, pull out your current maintenance org chart, the one that shows who's actually on your team right now. Then ask three questions. One, was this org structure designed around the assets you're maintaining today, all the ones you had when it was last reviewed. 2. If your fleet technology has shifted, more electrics, more onboard diagnostics, more complex control systems, does your skills mix reflect that shift? And 3. If you lost two people to leave or resignation tomorrow, do you have a plan to cover the gap without your maintenance capability falling over? If any of those answers make you uncomfortable, that's where your people readiness work starts. And you don't need a new fleet arriving to make this exercise worth doing. The all-chart you have today was built for yesterday's problems. It's worth checking whether it's still the right one. Until next time, take care. Bye.