Does your organisation have the right number of people and resources to run efficiently and meet its goals?

It is one thing to have standards in place to aspire to, but if you’re not appropriately resourced it is going to be very difficult to meet those standards. Maybe you have too many staff, or not enough. Maybe you have enough people, but they’re not in the right jobs to create an efficient and successful operation?

Whatever the case may be, if you have identified performance issues then Bluefield can help by conducting a review of your maintenance organisational design. Whenever Bluefield is engaged by a company to perform a maintenance evaluation or review, one of the key issues raised is whether the operation has the right number of people to run efficiently and meet their goals. OEMs will often provide maintenance labour ratios to give sites a guide to staffing numbers for machine maintenance, but these are usually better suited to an operational set up rather than ongoing operations. Sometimes they are general guidelines that fail to account for all of the variables of your particular mine site.

And that’s where Bluefield can help. Whether it’s part of a general site review or as a stand-alone evaluation, our organisational design service utilises a Mobile Labour Estimate that can accurately determine the ideal ratio of maintenance personnel for your business. Our benchmarks relate to the number of people per machine and the structure of maintenance teams within different mine sites. The methodology has been developed and honed over many years and is robust and sound, yet simple to operationalise.

We work within an operational improvement framework that takes into account maintenance effort rather than just utilisation effort. As maintenance improves, equipment utilisation is also improved and therefore more labour hours are required. Then as better practices are implemented and staff are working more efficiently, the number of people required can be scaled back. We’ve worked with many sites that believed they needed more people, only to find that they just needed to be better utilised or structured. In cases where more staff are required, short term resources will often see the company through until they improve their execution time, efficiency and overall performance quality.

We work closely with you to assess the current operation and historical data relating to scheduled maintenance and unscheduled breakdowns as well as labour hour availability. We will take into account shifts and technical skills while working with your supervisors to calculate the resources required.

We also assist if you’re starting up a new site or setting up a new line and need to establish the ideal structure and staffing numbers required in the early stages of the operation.

Would you like to run a self-assessment of your mobile equipment or fixed plant team requirements? You can download our Mobile Labour Estimate worksheet to get a handle on your basic maintenance labour needs.