RS releases ‘Performance in Focus’ 2024 Maintenance Engineering Report  in partnership with the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE)

Staffing fears tops challenges as ‘prominent concern’ for maintenance engineers, while skills struggle to keep up with emerging technology

RS, a digitally enabled global distributor of product and service solutions for industrial customers, has released the ‘Performance in Focus’ 2024 Maintenance Engineering Report in conjunction with the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE). This is based on findings from a survey that aimed to uncover the challenges facing the profession and its priorities.

The survey drew responses from almost 400 maintenance professionals based in the UK and Ireland. The respondents were from sectors including manufacturing, working in job roles like maintenance engineer and engineering manager. Most respondents came from hands-on or operational roles, working in sectors including facilities and intralogistics, manufacturing, energy, and oil and gas.

The resulting report covers key areas including challenges, strategies and priorities, maintenance maturity and data, and tackling unscheduled downtime.

While attracting talent was a top three issue for maintenance engineers in the 2023 report, staffing fears have risen to the top of the agenda for 2024, with half of respondents now citing this as a prominent concern. More than a third (37 per cent) point to this as their top challenge, rising to 42 per cent for larger organisations.

Lydia Amarquaye, education and skills policy lead at the IMechE, isn’t surprised that skills have risen up the agenda and cites a need to work together to get more people into engineering.

She said: “We need to raise the profile of engineering in schools and help to raise the profile of maintenance, in particular, as a valued part of the mix. Industry needs to take responsibility for developing talent, including developing apprenticeships and helping graduates who join with a broad skill set to gain specific skills for their particular industry.”

With a growing requirement for data analysis in the quest for more effective maintenance strategies, lack of data interpretation capabilities presents a challenge. The skill set of the current engineering pool appears not to be catching up with evolving technology.

The report highlighted an increased reliance on Excel spreadsheets and paper records, with 37 per cent and 59 per cent respectively saying they are still used in-house. But while paper and manual records are on the rise, the report showed that 62 per cent of organisations use computerised maintenance management systems (CMMS) – up from 49 per cent the year before – and the use of Excel spreadsheets is most common among firms with low levels of maturity. Only one in five (22 per cent) use enterprise asset management systems, down from 39 per cent in 2023’s report.

The nightmare scenario of unscheduled downtime is still all too common, with the average organisation spending 15 hours a week battling it, down from 20 hours last year. This is down by a quarter on last year’s figures, which is mildly encouraging. However, it still accounts for 24 hours a week for more than one in five (21 per cent) of organisations. The average hourly cost of downtime was higher this year at £5,471.95 (£5,121.81 last year). The biggest single cause of unscheduled downtime was cited as ageing assets, by 29 per cent of respondents, followed by mechanical failure, cited by 21 per cent of respondents.

Managing ageing assets is an ongoing challenge for maintenance professionals, according to Richard Jeffers, solutions and technical director at RS.

“Businesses don’t want to replace assets simply because they’ve reached a certain age and, as maintenance professionals, they should be focused on how they can maximise the life of an asset, which can increase cash flow for the business,” he said.

The survey findings highlighted that organisations are taking steps to reduce unscheduled downtime, the most common strategies being upgrading equipment and improving training (both 49 per cent), plans to introduce a preventative maintenance strategy (40 per cent) and a change in approach towards maintenance (30 per cent).

Raj Patel, RS UK & Ireland managing director, said: “Modern maintenance professionals face a tricky balancing act between the day-to-day realities of ensuring facilities are safe and operational, and longer-term projects designed to prevent future breakdowns or inefficiencies.

“It was encouraging to see organisations are deploying a variety of strategies to help reduce unscheduled downtime in the report. But there’s a wide spectrum of results here in terms of maintenance maturity and there’s still clearly a way to go. Maintenance professionals should seek to leverage suppliers for both reliability and quality of parts supply, and solutions providers to outsource elements of maintenance, particularly if the required specialist skills aren’t available in-house.”

The IMechE is a global organisation with around 115,000 members, and holds the mission to improve the world through engineering.

The RS and IMechE  ‘Performance in Focus’ 2024 Maintenance Engineering Report can be downloaded in full  here.

A vast selection of infographics and images is available here.