What are some tips and ideas for ensuring team adoption of a preventative maintenance program?

If you want a successful preventive maintenance program, you have to start with the technicians. They are the ones implementing the day-to-day program, and if they don’t buy into it, failure is imminent. In fact, one study found that between 80 percent and 90 percent of all CMMS implementations fail. One big component of that is the lack of acceptance by the maintenance team. Take a look at the following practical ways to help get your front-line technicians, as well as the rest of your organization, behind a preventive maintenance program to ensure its success.

Explain What’s In It For Them

It’s easy to understand the skepticism that sometimes abounds within business. To the front-line employees, it can seem like management just rolls out a new program every few months. If programs have fallen by the wayside in the past, your technicians may just view a new preventive maintenance initiative as more corporate-speak and keep doing the things they’ve been doing.

Instead of simply introducing preventive maintenance as an abstract concept designed to improve efficiency and cut costs, put the benefits in terms of what’s in it for the technicians. For example:

• Tie reaching preventive maintenance benchmarks to technician bonuses
• Introduce promotion opportunities made available by preventive maintenance technology
• Solicit feedback about preventive maintenance tasks and processes

If technicians understand why they should do something differently, they will have some skin in the game and be much more likely to follow through with requirements.

Solicit Help From Tech Partner

Be sure you work with a preventive maintenance technology partner that’s with you for the long haul. Rely on this partner’s help to you with the onboarding of new software or computer systems. After all, it’s in your partner’s best interest to successfully implement the new system. You want to find a solution that can be quickly implemented and intuitive to use as well as a company that will provide ongoing support to your entire organization.

Unify Top Management

There’s nothing like infighting between top managers to break down implementation of a new system. If technicians and other employees don’t see complete buy-in for adoption from their supervisors, it will be easy to take sides, which will at least slow down implementation, if not halt it all together. Be sure your top management understands the big picture benefits of preventive maintenance and provides a unified front to the rest of your organization.