MaintainNZ
Overview
In Kawerau, a National Centre of Maintenance Excellence, MaintainNZ, has been established to lift manufacturing productivity levels across New Zealand’s major industries. This highly successful initiative is providing best practice training in maintenance and reliability engineering. Norske Skog Tasman, Fonterra, the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union, NZ Trade and Enterprise and the Auckland University of Technology are partners in the initiative.
Productivity Challenge
MaintainNZ was set up to address the challenge of improving maintenance training and best practice in order to address skill shortages and get productivity up to an international level. The idea for this came from a Norske Skog union delegate. Fonterra now uses MaintainNZ as their national training site for all their staff involved in maintenance and reliability engineering.
The Productivity Achievement
- All partners have a common agenda based on a significant need and without fear of competition or threat.
- Time taken in investing in building partnerships is worth it for the long term results.
- Leadership and management buy-in for this initiative came from the top. To make it happen, industry paid for a project manager to do the start-up phase.
- All training was industry driven and to national training standards.
- The initiative was set up by industry with government agencies being involved as they were needed.
- Staff buy-in was important to understanding a change in the way training had been done and providing training that is relevant to their jobs and to a national standard.
The full MaintainNZ productivity case studies are available as HTML and PDF