Equipment Downtime and Lost Time Incidents
For many years, Aerojet Maintenance has struggled with worker injuries and lost time or time away from work associated with those injuries. In addition to the lost time issue, machinery breakdowns and obsolete and antiquated machinery are major problems that the maintenance department has to contend with on a daily basis. On initial review, there appeared to be a connection between when employees sustained work-associated injuries and when a piece or pieces of equipment were out of service. Since these issues have a major impact on the maintenance department and consequently the overall yearly budget allocation, it was this team's project to determine if there is a correlation between machinery breakdowns and lost time incidents within the maintenance department. If the hypothesis is correct, the effect of equipment downtime to the overall yearly budget is greater than initially thought, as is the effect of employee injuries.
The initial that the team wanted to address was the high amount of paid time away in the maintenance department. The first process of the research was to identify from the staff what the issue was. A survey was formulated to ask the maintenance staff if the issue was from management or from the work environment. The questions were designed off of the Gallup organizations Q12 survey. The questions were given a value from 1 to 5 one being strongly disagree to strongly agree. The questions in the survey given to the workers were as follows:
1. I have received recognition in the past five days
2. I have the best working tools
3. I have all of the equipment needed to do the best job possible
4. I know what is expected of m ...