5 replies to this topic

[Miss Frankie]

In your facility, who is in charge of equipment upkeep, such as painting?

 

We have a large, walking cooler that is painted on the inside.  We also have a couple pieces of large equipment that is painted.  The production floor is very humid, and things rust....quickly. 
I think maintenance should have painting as part of their PMs.  The maintenance dept. thinks painting should be done by production.
It usually ends up being done by QC because we're the only ones that will step up and do it (and one guy lives super close so it's easy for him to come in on a weekend when production isn't working and paint.)

[jfrey123]

This is 100% a maintenance task everywhere I've worked, and IMO you're absolutely right that it should be a PM item if it needs to be done regularly.

 

And keep in mind, in most GFSI schemes, that any maintenance activities done by production employees would require records of their training on this action.  If you lack training records for production employees to perform painting tasks, that's an issue.  And if you're not documenting the weekend guy's actions, that's an issue too.

[Totes716]

It depends on your facility.  There will always be conflict between QA/QC and the rest of the firm in terms of who does what.  For us, it comes down to department politics.  I've gotten jobs before which very clearly belong to production, outside sanitation, and/or maintenance.  Basically, get it done.

 

Painting should belong to maintenance or outside contractors. 

[Brothbro]

This is 100% a maintenance task, and if you do indeed have a maintenance department it should be their responsibility. The identification of the problem may fall on QA (for example, during a facility inspection the QA team notices the paint is worn), but the actual painting would fall on the maintenance team. 

 

The smaller a company is however, the more lines get blurred. However keep in mind that for tasks like these some knowledge on proper technique is key. Would you really want production staff to paint a wall? Or install a door? Their skills in these tasks were not evaluated when they were hired; you have no idea how good of a job they'd do. Your maintenance team though, they have been evaluated for their skills in these tasks. This also means you can hold them accountable to their level of work. So it's only natural that they do it.

[SQFconsultant]

This is on Maintenance.

Interesting - I've never seen a walk in box that was painted.

[kfromNE]

Agree with others - maintenance. Though we've had production employees help out. This is one reason we have maintenance staff on shift outside of production hours. To do tasks that aren't feasible during production.

 

In small plants - the lines get very blurred.

 

Is the employee working on a Saturday by themselves? Personally, I don't think that is very safe. An accident could happen. The only employees we have working during off hours and alone - management in their offices.