<p>Jeffboat is a company with a long history. Originally named the Howard Steamboat Company, Jeffboat is America’s largest inland ship builder and has been manufacturing ships for over 100 years. Jeffboat has built such famous ships as the Mississippi Queen, the General Jackson showboat and the Casino Aztar riverboat casino. Like most manufacturing firms, Jeffboat has an enormous amount of equipment stretched out over a shipyard that is over a mile in length that is needed to make its boats. Also like many old-line manufacturing firms, Jeffboat has both equipment and employees who have been there for several decades. <br />Overall, because of the size of the shipyard and age of the equipment, Jeffboat’s maintenance was used to working in reactive mode. There was no CMMS software in place and equipment was put into numerous Excel spreadsheets. In addition, it was often hit or miss whether the right parts were in the stores room and finding the right equipment often took maintenance technicians a significant amount of time. There was no Scheduler/Planner and maintenance procedures were done informally and based on need at that particular moment.</p><p>When implementing a maintenance management strategy, a critical component is the resistance to change. Whether it is the introduction of new software or a complete overhaul of the maintenance function, the process of change represents disruptive technology (Christenson, …). According to Christenson, most changes are really improvements on something old and the old paradigms can be used. However, there are changes that organizations need to make that disrupt the dominant paradigm, rather than sustaining it. These are disruptive technologies and make the old things less important or obsolete. The problem with these disruptive changes is that people are still applying the old paradigms to the new realities. They are trying, in a sense, to understand the car as nothing more than a carriage without horses.</p>
A 1990 graduate of the MBA program at Concordia University, Richard Beer has been a Maintenance Management Specialist since 1993. Richard currently works as a Practice Manager where his knowledge and expertise assist our client organizations to transition from reactive to proactive maintenance. Richard brings practical experience having worked as a Maintenance Planner and Manager for Toronto Lester B. Pearson International Airport. In addition Richard worked for Datastream Systems as a lead consultant for their software implementations and training on their MP2 and MP5 (Currently Infor EAM) systems. His abilities in strategic management as it relates to maintenance is unrivalled as witnessed in his top ten golden rules of database management and can be found at www.trosolutions.com. Richard has thrived in a "misunderstood" and often forgotten niche of business offering maintenance management solutions to manufacturing, pharmaceutical, food processing and transportation industries in need of maximizing plant uptime, optimizing PM programs, stores management and reducing maintenance costs. Highly personable and down-to-earth, but at the same time, well-versed in technology and his Industry, Richard is a clear champion of "out-of-the-box" thinking. He knows what is needed to succeed.
