Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast Maintenance vs. operations—Improving Communication Through Shop Floor Accountability (Ask A Plant Manager)
Mar 5, 2026
Joe Kuhn, former plant manager and reliability consultant who runs Lean Driven Reliability, offers practical manufacturing wisdom. He discusses resolving maintenance vs operations conflict, why operations should own reliability, a 90-day truce to rebuild trust, go-and-see shop-floor practices, and how to find and formalize mentors to strengthen teams.
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Operations Must Own Reliability
- Operations must own reliability to resolve dysfunctional tension between maintenance and operations.
- Joe Kuhn explains maintenance provides technical counsel and execution while operations makes tradeoff decisions and ultimately owns outcomes like downtime.
Require Precise Maintenance Counsel And Plans
- Do expect maintenance to provide precise technical counsel and an execution plan when requesting outages.
- Maintenance should specify parts, crew readiness, lockout/tagout plan, and a realistic hours estimate tied to prior lessons learned.
12 Hour Outage That Only Yielded Four Hours
- Joe recounts a common frustration where a 12-hour outage yields only about four productive hours due to late starts, missing parts, and long breaks.
- That inefficiency infuriates operations and fuels distrust between teams.
