Ryan's Thoughts: UpKeep's 2020 Year in Review
Honestly, last year was quite the year. As many can attest for 2020, not much had gone according to plan. We had successes beyond our belief, but we also had failures along the way. Now that 2020 has come to a close, I always feel that it’s important to reflect back about how much good there was despite all of the challenges.
Ryan's Thoughts: Why We Need to Bridge the Maintenance "Skill Gap" Now!
The world of maintenance can be unforgiving and chaotic. All it takes is for one mishap, one bad day, one task to slip through the cracks. That’s all it takes to cost a team millions of dollars, or even worse, risk someone’s life. Thus, you can imagine that the level of skill, craft, and attention to detail in work sectors like these are immense. The demands for high skill labor in maintenance and reliability are incredible. Yet, an ever present and ever growing “skill gap” exists. There just aren’t enough qualified apprentices to fill in the void left behind by retiring professionals - the ones who have (literally) paved the way, only to look back to see that not enough people are following down the road. If we don’t start making progress now, our infrastructure could possibly collapse by the next generation, if not in the coming decade.
Ryan's Thoughts: How COVID has Accelerated Digital Transformation in US Manufacturing
A year ago, U.S. manufacturing stood at record highs of $2.4 billion in output which accounted for 11 percent of U.S. GDP (Source: The State of Manufacturing 2019). Today, most reports and surveys will paint a story about how COVID-19 has threatened these numbers and ultimately hindered progress in manufacturing.
Ryan's Thoughts: Why we Must Address Safety When Talking Maintenance and Reliability
The women and men that serve in maintenance and reliability risk their lives every single day to support, sustain, and maintain the infrastructure that we all benefit from. In 2018 there were over 900,000 workplace injuries reported and over 5,000 deaths (Link to OSHA statistics here). Not to mention, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, estimates that over half of workplace injuries go unreported and the danger has only become more pronounced since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ryan's Thoughts: Maintenance is Actually a Production and Revenue Machine
Maintenance today is often seen as a necessary evil by most businesses and would choose not to do it if they could. Instead, they do it because they have to and someone told them they should or “you will pay the price for it later”. In that sense, we’ve been conditioned to think of maintenance as an expensive cost-prevention tool and as an insurance policy for all the assets that generate revenue for the business today.
