Maintenance landscape mapped in new report from RS and IMechE

The findings come from the ‘Industry in Motion 2023 Maintenance Engineering Report’ from RS, which is based on findings from a survey of over 1,200 IMechE members.

The report, delivered in conjunction with the IMechE and focused on the responses of almost 700 people in the UK and Ireland, covers monitoring maintenance engineering, skills, the true cost of breakdowns, raising performance through stakeholder collaboration, and harnessing technology to improve efficiency.

The top three challenges respondents cited as expecting to affect them over the next 12 months were attracting talent (47 per cent), inflation and higher costs (47 per cent), and supply chain disruption (40 per cent). The report looks also at the drivers of unscheduled downtime and its cost to a business.

Ageing assets and mechanical failures are the biggest drivers of unscheduled downtime. The report also revealed:

• Nearly 20 hours are spent each week on unscheduled maintenance, compared with around 18 hours spent each week on scheduled maintenance
• The average hourly cost of downtime is £5,121.81
• The average weekly cost of unscheduled downtime is £100,371
• Organisations need to reign in maintenance spend, as nearly a third of respondents do not know what proportion of their annual operating budget is spent on maintenance; 30 per cent state approximately five to 10 per cent is spent.

To decrease unscheduled downtime, respondents cited upgrading equipment (48 per cent) and widening monitoring capabilities (46 per cent) as key priorities. To further tackle the issue, planned maintenance has emerged as the number one company strategy in place, deemed the highest priority by 53 per cent of respondents.

In a statement, Emma Botfield, managing director for RS in the UK and Ireland, said: “The challenges facing businesses today mean that maintenance engineers are even more critical to manufacturing success, while under pressure to do more with their existing resources which often include ageing assets. They’re also firefighting because of the geopolitical environment and its effect on supply chains.”

The issue of an ageing skilled workforce and a large age gap to the next engineers coming through was highlighted in the report. Meanwhile, Millennials – a group that made up more than half of the respondents – are reaching key decision-making positions within organisations.

According to data from EngineeringUK, people aged between 25 and 34 now constitute the largest single age group in engineering roles.

Lydia Amarquaye, professional development and education policy advisor at the IMechE, said: “Millennials have grown up with different technologies and they will be trying to implement some of these in their work to make life more efficient for themselves. I think we’re going to see the effects of this shift coming through in the way that businesses are conducted, as it plays into management styles. So, I think it is going to be exciting for the industry as a whole.”

Outsourcing maintenance requirements can help organisations overcome issues such as skills shortages, and the report found that over 60 per cent of respondents are outsourcing some form of maintenance requirement, with a gap in skills being the top two reasons.

On digital transformation, 16 per cent of respondents stated they use Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and fewer than a fifth said their company is planning a digital transformation in the next 12 months.

RS believes this is because terms like IIoT and digital transformation are not used by operational maintenance people. Condition monitoring, which uses IIoT, is being employed, according to more than half of the respondents. The top two technologies are vibration measurement – used by 44 per cent of respondents – and current monitoring, used by 43 per cent. The main benefits cited from using these technologies are understanding asset health (68 per cent) and better prediction of failures (53 per cent).

Botfield said: “This report shows that in the face of a multitude of challenges, maintenance engineers are keeping the wheels of UK industry turning and facing up to these challenges. They should aim to bolster efforts by working with trusted suppliers who understand what they are trying to achieve and where the pain points lie. This will allow them to achieve the best value for money for the organisation.”

The RS and IMechE ‘Industry In Motion’ 2023 Maintenance Engineering Report,’ can be downloaded here.