Internal Maintenance Contracts - A Best Practice?
-Contributed by Sarath Srinivasan
Recently I visited the facilities of a 'service' retail outlet in a small town in Nagpur. The interesting aspect was that the owner of this enterprise had trained his employees to perform maintenance on the equipment. The innovation from his side was that he had done with by awarding maintenance contracts to individuals within his organisation. So if there were 4-5 machines to be maintained in a shop, each had a maintenance contract which was given to a person working at the shop. This person was then trained to perform the job. By providing a monetary incentive for maintenance in the form of a service contract he was able to ensure that his equipment was taken care of. This would also ensure that preventative maintenance is undertaken on a regular basis. Esepcially if the maintenance contract is on a fixed fee basis, it make so much more sense for the person to maintain the equipment and ensure no failures rather than spend inordinate amount of time trying to repair failed equipment under time pressures.
