Podcast: Why one size doesn’t fit all — Determining employee ratios and organizational structures at your plant

Joe Kuhn, CMRP, former plant manager, engineer, and global reliability consultant, is now president of Lean Driven Reliability LLC. He is the author of the book “Zero to Hero: How to Jumpstart Your Reliability Journey Given Today’s Business Challenges” and the creator of the Joe Kuhn YouTube Channel, which offers content on starting your reliability journey and achieving financial independence. In our monthly podcast miniseries, Ask a Plant Manager, Joe considers a commonplace scenario facing the industry and offers his advice, as well as actions that you can take to get on track tomorrow. This episode offers insight into how to determine employee ratios on the plant floor and throughout the company.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

PS: So today we're going to talk some numbers, very specifically, employee ratios on the plant floor and throughout the company. So overall, how do you determine your organizational structure as a company? And should it be something that is the same at every plant floor, or is it something also that stays consistent all the time at one plant?

So Joe, very specifically, what is the right ratio for technicians to planners, or what's the right number for how many people one person should be supervising? Again, how do you apply this to engineering staff or other important departments? And most importantly, what role does your maintenance plan play in your organization's internal structure?

JK: Well, there's a lot going on there, and I'm going to disappoint people at the very beginning and say, there is no magic number. Okay, let me talk about what I did wrong early in my career, around the year 2003. I got some training on reliability and maintenance best practices. I saw a book on ratios: ‘Hey, supervisors should be eight to 10 crafts people to one supervisor, a planner, maybe 15 to 20 to one, a maintenance engineer like 20 to one, and a reliability engineer somewhere around 20 to one. So I took that said, ‘hey, if I just get those ratios, we get better. We get better.’ Didn't happen. Okay, didn't happen. We didn't hire all the way up to those ratios, but I was able to add a couple supervisors and a couple planners. Another mistake I made was we combined the maintenance engineer and reliability engineer into one role. I'll talk about that in a second.

We were frustrated. And I'm telling you, I remember sitting down with the leadership team and saying: ‘Is this as good as it gets? We're doing these best practices. We've had external audits come in, and we've had internal audits come in and we got these ratios. Things are going okay.’ But we didn't move. The reliability of equipment wasn't seeing any difference. Production didn't see any difference, and our costs were still going up. So it's then I realized, and I have got to credit Ron Moore, he's got a book Making Common Sense Common Practice, and I tell you, I read that three times before I picked up on the key. The key is problem solving. Organizations and people are in place to solve problems. You can't just throw people at a problem. You can't just throw extra people into your existing culture and expect it to improve. You have to have an expectation of change. And it comes from, like I said, this is all about problem solving. What problems do you have in your plant? Okay, you’ve got to know the problems that are in your plant.

So a couple examples. Say you go out and observe. And I'm really big on observe, observing things in reality, not just being in a conference room, but go out and observe. This is the action for Monday. Go out and observe a PM being conducted, or a planned job being conducted, and expect to be amazed. For example, what's the expectation around a planned job and having a kit put together with all the parts, pieces, if you're replacing a pump? Do you have a new coupling there? Do you have any key stock there? Do they need any lubrication? What's the expectation? Lots of times it's like, ‘Hey, three mechanics, you're going to change out this pump. Good luck finding the pump. I ordered it a month ago. It's somewhere in the shop.’ That's typically how people plan jobs. But can we do better than that? Yeah, we can have a kitting process. What's the standard for kitting? Get a seasoned mechanic out there to put every part, piece, every tool that they need in a kit to do the job in bin #A22 and everybody knows right where it is. So that's a problem that you can solve, and that changes the expectations on the planners. If you have three planners in your plant and you say, we want to do full job kitting, you may need four. The answer, the number, really, the number you're looking for, is directly related to the problems you're trying to solve.

Another problem we had is we had too many people assigned to a job. So we would have a two-person job that we'd have three people at. So what's the expectation of the planner? The planner should be looking at how they're going to execute that job. Do we need two people? Do we need three people? Do we need one? So what's the expectations of the planner? Are you expected to anticipate wrench time or efficiency problems? Well, the planners’ current state in my plant was: ‘No, that's the job of the supervisor. I put three mechanics on the job, but they get to decide.’ Well, no, very clearly, we came out with planners do this.

Another big one, so I talked about planners, but for supervisors, it depends on how many problems you're trying to solve. For example, say you have eight mechanics, and the work is very routine, very simple, and you've got every mechanic is 20 years experienced. Well, a day comes and goes with very few problems. Now imagine you have eight brand new people, and the process is very unstable, and they need a lot of technical sense assistance and guidance. Well, you may only be able to have six technicians for one supervisor, where, if everybody's experienced and it's routine, you're an established business, established process, you may be able to go 15. Depends on the problem you're trying to solve.

Now I want to get on the engineers, because this was really an embarrassing one for me. A big mistake is we said, ‘Hey, we want to have reliability engineers. So we crowned the maintenance engineers as a dual purpose role. You are to do maintenance engineering and then reliability engineering in the same area. That work drives ownership. We thought it made a lot of sense. The problem is the urgent of the day, the crisis of the day, always trumps the strategic. What happened is the maintenance engineer was consumed with things to do until about 4:30 and then about 4:30 in the afternoon, they were free to do reliability work. That didn't work at all. What we ended up doing is taking, say you have six engineers, just to throw out an example, six engineers. Let's have four of them do maintenance engineering work, and two of them full-time reliability engineering work. And those reliability engineers do not work on the urgent they do not work on the disaster of the day. They work on the historical disaster. Okay, so again, I can't give you a ratio for engineers. Depends on how many problems you have. So if you have every year your pumps are your number one reliability issue, your number one cost issue, you should probably have your reliability engineer focus on that. Now, if you have 15 of these number one problems and it's total chaos, you may need more reliability engineers for the next three to four years to start solving those problems, put in practices and PMs and condition monitoring and design so that you can get rid of those historical problems. Then maybe you can go down to one. I doubt zero, so it changes over time for your question. But if they're asking what the ratio is? That's the wrong question. You should know the problems you’ve got. What problems do we have? And then the organization follows that.

So the last question you had is, what role does the maintenance plan play into the organizational structure? Well, the maintenance plan is, how much downtime we need, how much downtime we need for preventive maintenance, how much downtime we need for planned work, and what's the reliability of equipment? That's critical. If you don't know the answer to that, you don't know how much to sell to the customer, you don't know how many shifts of operations you need. And you can't put together a business plan if you don't understand the maintenance plan. I mean, it's fundamental, it's not an afterthought. It's critical. Hey, if you need to be down 48 hours every month for planned maintenance, that's got to come out of the production numbers. If you're a 24/7 operation, maybe you're going to do that maintenance on the weekend when you know you're down every weekend. What's the reliability through the week? And if you're going to solve this pump issue or this motor issue, that is your number one issue. Hey, you can sell that. You can sell that as an increased capacity.

PS: So no magic number?

JK: No, and I'm telling you, I'm passionate about that because I did it wrong. I went with the number first, and then scratched my head, and I lost a year, and it was when I realized that, ‘Hey, the problem solving comes first.’ Then you know what problems you got, that comes first, sorry, you know what problems you got, then you try to solve it, and then the organization structure implements that strategy. That's what's important.What you can do on Monday, you’ve got to go and see go and watch a planned job, and I promise you, it'll be dramatically different than you would expect. You'll see waste and there's just no way this was an unusual day. You'll probably write it off: ‘Okay, that's an anomaly. We're never this bad.’ But if you go out and do it the next day, and the next day, you'll say: ‘Yeah, we got problems.’ Then you'd come up with an organization structure that solves those problems. That's what's key.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.