This article is one of our favourites from around the web. We've included an excerpt below but do go and read the original!
Expansion signals success, but it also introduces complexity that can quickly overwhelm unprepared maintenance operations. Whether you're opening new facilities, acquiring assets, or growing your team, understanding these common challenges helps you anticipate problems and develop effective solutions before they impact reliability.
As you add facilities, ensuring consistent maintenance quality becomes exponentially harder. Each new site risks developing its own procedures, standards, and practices, creating silos that prevent knowledge sharing and make performance comparisons meaningless. Without deliberate standardisation efforts, what works brilliantly at one location may never reach others, whilst poor practices can take root unchecked.
Rapid team expansion often means hiring less experienced technicians who lack the institutional knowledge veteran staff possess. New team members need training not just on equipment, but on your organisation's specific procedures, safety requirements, and expectations. The time experienced technicians spend training newcomers reduces capacity for actual maintenance work, creating a temporary productivity dip precisely when you need maximum output.
More people and locations mean more potential for miscommunication. Work orders get lost, priorities become unclear, and important information fails to reach the right people. What functioned adequately with a small, co-located team - verbal updates, whiteboard schedules, informal coordination, collapses under the weight of geographic dispersion and larger headcount.
Deciding which sites get which resources, how to distribute spare parts inventory, and where to deploy specialised expertise becomes increasingly complex. Centralising too much creates delays; distributing everything duplicates costs. Finding the right balance whilst ensuring critical parts and skills are available when needed challenges even experienced maintenance managers.
Expanding facilities may mean inheriting different equipment types, maintenance systems, or work processes from acquired sites. Integrating these disparate systems whilst maintaining operations requires significant effort. Even greenfield expansions face decisions about which technologies to deploy and how to ensure they integrate with existing infrastructure.
Your maintenance culture, the attitudes, work ethic, and commitment to quality that define your team, can dilute rapidly during expansion. New hires haven't absorbed these values, and distant facilities may feel disconnected from headquarters. Maintaining the standards and collaborative spirit that made your original operation successful requires intentional effort across a dispersed organisation.
Leadership expects expanded facilities to contribute quickly, but maintenance operations often require upfront investment before efficiency gains materialise. Justifying proper staffing, training, and systems when pressure exists to minimise costs creates tension between doing things right and doing things cheaply.
These challenges are manageable with proper planning, the right technology infrastructure, and commitment to standardisation. Organisations that address these issues proactively position their maintenance operations for sustainable expansion rather than chaotic scrambling.
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