You can see the effect in repair times. Siemens research found that average repair times at the world’ s largest companies rose from 49 to 81 minutes in five years. Machines haven’ t become dramatically harder to fix in that time. What has changed is who’ s fixing them, and what help they have when they do.
Why recruitment alone won’ t fix it
The instinct is to treat this as an HR problem- hire more engineers, train more apprentices. Both matter, but neither closes the gap quickly enough, because the shortage isn’ t only of people. It’ s of knowledge.
Every site has a handful of engineers who know its equipment inside out. They know which conveyor trips when the hall gets humid, which controller needs a particular reset sequence and which bearing always goes first. Very little of that is written down, and for older or mixed generation kit it often isn’ t in any manual either. When those people retire or move on, the knowledge leaves with them, and no job advert brings it back.
New automation makes this harder. Every additional system adds to what a technician might need to know, and the newest kit is often the least familiar.
What works
The manufacturers handling this well tend to do three things.
First, they plan maintenance as part of the automation project, not after it. Before new equipment goes in, they agree who will look after it, which spares need to be on the shelf, what training is needed and how faults and fixes will be recorded. That’ s far easier to set up at installation than once the warranty has run out.
Second, they capture knowledge at the point of work. Rather than asking busy engineers to write up procedures at the end of a shift, they use a mobile device to quickly record a voice note or photo attached to the job and linked to the specific machine. Over time, that builds a history of what went wrong and what fixed it, available to whoever works on that asset next.
MACHINERY, AUTOMATION, CONTROL & ENGINEERING 15