Insights on Excellence | "Insights on Excellence" Archive

How to eliminate paying the Maytag repair man

by Stephen Hawley Martin
for Virginia Business
December 12, 2006

Everyone knows the Maytag man - the lonely maintenance guy who sits with his feet on a desk waiting for the phone to ring, hoping something will break and need his attention. Well, he does exist. As the health-care industry struggles with rising costs and caps on reimbursements from insurers and government agencies, providers have looked for ways to save money.

Health care facilities - nursing homes in particular, house a lot of equipment. They have HVAC systems, electrical, phone and plumbing systems, institutional-size kitchens, and special equipment for disabled residents. They also have a maintenance man or two. These guys are often much like the Maytag man - on duty to fix what gets broken and perform routine maintenance. They are handy guys to have around when things go wrong. But they are expensive, too, and not necessarily busy all the time - in other words, when calculations are made of how much of their time is actually spent fixing something, it may be found they are actually quite unproductive. And nonproductive labor is an expensive luxury.

A new book due out from Oaklea Press called "Working the Clock" tells about a company called META USA, which offers a service that eliminates this luxury payroll item and meets the operational needs of a facility. This company identifies the maintenance needs of a site and puts together a routine maintenance plan for the equipment.

The facilities don't really need someone on site 40 hours a week. We all know the furnace only goes out on nights and weekends anyway. So what META does is outsource the maintenance role, rotating personnel among several facilities as needed, providing support and actually extending the life of the equipment through their proactive maintenance program, while reducing the overall cost for the maintenance function.

It seems to me, however, that instead of a salesman from META USA having to point out this reality to nursing home managers, these facilities should be recognizing this situation and calling him. Why doesn't it happen? Because of visibility. Maintenance worker activity isn't tracked, and emergency work orders and system breakdowns aren't linked to the labor cost to fix them. Overall facility maintenance isn't measured or reported against labor utilization.

No one knows the cost of the friendly Maytag man relative to the true need for his services. Managers don't even stop to ask. And since the disparity between the need for the labor and the labor supplied isn't reported, no one sees a problem. Workforce Management Technology (WMT), which we've been discussing in this space, would bring this story to light.

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Stephen Hawley Martin is a former principal of The Martin Agency in Richmond and the author of more than half a dozen books including his newest, Lean Enterprise Leader: How to Get Things Done Without Doing It All Yourself. He is editor and publisher of The Oaklea Press, a book publishing business dedicated primarily to helping business executives increase productivity.