The Snapshot Audit and Re-Audit

In this chapter I will show how, in the space of two brief visits to an industrial installation—the first to carry out a ‘snapshot’ exercise, the second a short re-audit—the audit method can be employed for mapping the essential characteristics and problems of the maintenance function. The case study used to illustrate this also highlights the importance of making (as far as possible) supervisors and teams ‘equipment-responsible’ and also shows how difficult it is to make strategic and organizational changes in a trade-union-dominated environment.

Introduction

Over a period of five days in 1994, and working on my own, I carried out a snapshot audit of the maintenance and engineering departments at an underground coal mining company, COALCOM. Three years later, and also working alone, I carried out a three-day re-audit.

COALCOM comprised three underground collieries—operating three shifts per day, for a five day week and for fifty weeks per year—and a coal preparation plant (see Figure 6–1). The coal was taken to the preparation plant by truck, and then by rail to coal loaders some two hundred miles away on the coast. The senior management structure is shown in Figure 6–2. At this level each of the collieries and the coal preparation plant functioned as semiautonomous production units. An Engineering Manager (with a secretary) had then just been appointed to assist in the co-ordination of the de-centralized engineering departments, which carried out capital project work and had the responsibility for the off-site overhauls of major equipment (some of which was shared between the collieries).