Pro Tip: Now’s the time to alter the way a maintenance department recruits, trains and retains employees along with how it spends money to help enhance your bakery operations.

A year in bakery life doesn’t necessarily go by a calendar. Year-to-year activity is usually just one big blur. Sure, business drops off and then picks up again at certain times, but overall, there is a constant sense that tomorrow will be just like today. When we live with that mindset, change rarely happens.

If you are struggling with performance, systems or ways of working, maybe it’s time to start over. With the rollover to the new year, it might be a good time to evaluate how you do things and ask yourself why they might not be working. Staying stuck in a rut will simply deliver another year like the last.

An area of the bakery business that seems to have the most instability and weakest performance these days is maintenance. From the difficulty of recruiting, training and retaining mechanics, to the squeezed spending budgets and the pressure to perform, maintenance leaders are sometimes stuck when it comes to deciding what to do differently to change outcomes.

To change means to enter places few are comfortable with; it means taking risks.

Risk-taking is not necessarily a top-of-mind idea for bakery maintenance leaders. Many times, these leaders have taken over a system that someone else created under the long-time management group running the company.

Changing the way maintenance gets done means you have to sell ideas for change to the previous management team. Selling is another potentially uncomfortable place for the technically inclined.

So how can this happen? You have no choice; you must take risks and sell the idea of change. Chances are that if the maintenance department’s performance has negatively impacted business, no one will challenge new ideas.

There can be a hundred ways to get started, but here are some suggestions. As maintenance leaders, namely vice presidents, directors and plant leaders, you first must ask yourself, how are we recruiting? Are we vetting the candidates, or are we so desperate that we’ll take whoever walks in the door claiming to know something?

A difficult but rewarding process is to issue a test both on paper and on the bench. By putting a candidate through even the simplest test, you can quickly rule them in or out. You know what you need, so why wouldn’t you have them prove they can fulfill your requirements?

It takes time and effort, but this can lead to a selection of candidates that will deliver. This process also sets the stage for the new hire. It shows them you care and reveals your expectations.

For this process to work, you must ask the next question: Do we have real training programs, or are we simply sending new employees out to shadow an experience one and hope for the best?

Proper training is an investment. True investments must be managed. There are many resources to draw from that can help you set up what you have determined as the need for each newcomer.

This should always start with an evaluation of the individual technician’s abilities. Once you have a baseline, you then need to customize training initiatives so that you bring them up in areas in which the employees are weak and enhance areas where they are strong. Specific training in areas or on machines that the maintenance crew will be most responsible for can enhance their training regimen. One training regimen does not fit all.

Similar questions can be asked about your preventive maintenance programs, purchasing programs, communications and other critical business operations that can lead to an improved performance and service to the business.

Jeff Dearduff is owner of JED Manufacturing Services who provides “Bakery Guy Tips” to those everyday people working in production, maintenance and engineering. Connect with him on LinkedIn.