Maintenance & Facilities Management at Brompton Bicycle

Brompton is the UK’s largest manufacturer of bicycles, and the global appetite for its iconic folding bike has rarely been stronger. More people are living in cities, more commuters are avoiding public transport, and a cycling boom has reshaped demand. Behind the production line that meets that demand sits a maintenance and facilities function that has to keep precision engineering running at pace.

In this episode of the Comparesoft Maintenance Podcast, Philip Dewson, Head of Maintenance and Facilities at Brompton Bicycle, joins host Matt to talk through what good maintenance looks like in a busy UK manufacturing environment. Philip moved to Brompton after 15 years across food production businesses including McCain, Jordans Ryvita, Kolak Snack Foods and Crossip Drinks, and he brings a cross-industry view of how to build a team, plan effectively, and use maintenance to protect quality and brand.

How a Cycling Boom Tested Brompton’s Manufacturing Maintenance

Philip is candid that his arrival at Brompton coincided with an unusually busy moment for the brand, both commercially and operationally.

“Business is great in the bicycle industry,” he says. “Those of you who ride bikes or probably tried to buy bikes over the last year with all the COVID scenarios that we’ve had going on, it’s been really difficult to get a hold of bikes. The Brompton brand is going from strength to strength. There’s a real cycling boom at the moment.”

The shift in commuter behaviour has fed directly into demand. “People are still really wanting the Brompton brand all over the world. There’s more people living in cities than ever have been, and with COVID people want to avoid public transport. Those people already living in cities are trying to choose bikes to get into work, and being able to fold up a bike, take it into the office, take it into your house where space is at a premium as well, this really helps.”

Internally, he adds, the experience has been less straightforward. “It’s quite hard to start a new role when everyone’s coming disguised with a mask, when you’re going around and trying to speak to people and build those relationships, and half the faces are hidden.”

Building a Maintenance Culture on the Brompton Production Floor

A maintenance culture at Brompton starts with the team and is shaped by how the business already operates. Philip is clear that the maintenance function cannot be designed in isolation from production.

“It starts with the team, with the people who are there, and the culture of how the business operates at the current time,” he explains. “I always talk about safety, talk about quality, and talk about productivity and maintenance. So they all go hand in hand. The maintenance culture has got to interface with that.”

His method is deliberately simple. “I sit down with my team, as I have done with the guys at Brompton, and go through strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. A basic SWOT analysis always pulls up some good conversations with the team. They can help set their own culture, what they would like to aspire to be, and that becomes the target and the driving force for all the work that we do.”

The principle underneath is that culture sticks when the people doing the work help define it.

Making the Maintenance Team Visible Inside the Factory

Maintenance teams are often described as the unsung heroes of an organisation. Philip’s view is that visibility is earned through deliberate, demonstrable improvements that other people in the factory can see and feel, not through internal promotion.

“You’ve got to find those things that make the maintenance team visible and appreciated,” he says. “Some of the things that we’ve done quite quickly within Brompton, we had a dark, dingy area around the CNC areas. Working with the team and with some contractors, we’ve got the lighting improved, and that is literally a visible improvement in the area.”

The change was not just cosmetic. Philip ties it back to the maintenance discipline it enabled. “We’ve got the operators who can do the first inspections, and that can really tell us some of the problems and issues that are going wrong with their assets right at an early start. By investing into the area, investing into the operators, and then tying that back to good maintenance practices and getting the information out of the operators at an early point, you can build good relationships with the area managers.”

He is also a strong advocate for capturing the work visually. “Things like before and after pictures, I think are really, really important. Especially with digital cameras and high-resolution things, you can take some quite interesting images to share with the maintenance teams and with others to show the good work that you have done. That really helps to get the ball moving, so that you can get some good momentum.”

Why Brompton’s Maintenance Plan Lives or Dies on the Planner

Planned maintenance at Brompton depends on the quality of the maintenance planner more than any other single role. For Philip, the planner is the person who turns strategy into executed work, and a strong maintenance management plan lives or dies on that role.

“Planning maintenance activities, I believe, is what it’s all about,” he says. “To do that, you need a really good maintenance planner. You need somebody who’s got experience with the culture on the shop floor, who’s got those good relationships with the key stakeholders. There’s got to be a passion for how the business works and how the business operates to be able to build those relationships and work out how best they can get maintenance time planned in.”

A good planner does more than schedule jobs. Philip wants a critical, audit-style perspective. “Talking about root cause to people and really drilling into why things have happened to be able to say, okay, is the maintenance working at the moment? Can we take things off? Do we need to add anything? That critical look at the activities that we carry out as a team, so that they can have an audit perspective.”

He also flags a structural point that is often missed: planning should start before an asset arrives on site. “We get maintenance planning activities designed in really early on in the lifecycle of the asset, so that we understand how much maintenance is going to be required and how much is going to be planned in as soon as that lands on site. You just don’t want an asset to land on site, throw the keys over, and then crack on.”

Implementing a Maintenance Plan Across Brompton’s Production Assets

There is no template for implementing a maintenance plan across Brompton’s production assets. The right approach depends on the asset and the requirement, and Philip is firm that one size does not fit all. His approach mirrors the cross-functional rigour expected from any CMMS implementation in a manufacturing environment.

“It’s not a single brush,” he says. “One of the things I’m looking at for Brompton is the maintenance plan we’re doing at the moment. It started from a criticality view. What are the assets that are most critical on site?”

The criticality work is deliberately cross-functional. “I’ve been working with a team of production guys, with the manufacturing engineers, with my team, and we’ve got to be bringing in the quality engineers as well. A broad team approach to look at what the critical things are, both in a scoring mechanism and also: what is keeping the area managers awake at night? What are they worried about that’s going to impact their production output?”

From there, his team works through the failure modes that matter most. Philip’s approach to identifying common failure modes shares a foundation with condition-based maintenance principles, where the operator interface is treated as the most likely point of failure. “Look at the common failure modes. What’s rotating, what’s moving high frequency, what parts of the machine are the operators interfacing with? Because where the operators interface, that’s where you’re likely to get some failures.”

He has a specific warning about CMMS implementation: plans that look thorough on paper but never get executed. “It’s important that we don’t over plan, so that we don’t have a maintenance management system that is full of maintenance tickets, and we’re looking at it going, okay, where you’ve got a heap load of tickets, got a lot of planned maintenance, but it’s not been done. Really rigorously having a look at that to make sure that we’re not over planning and under-delivering.”

For maintenance leaders rolling out a new system, this is one of the most common failure modes, and avoiding it is covered in detail in our seven-step CMMS implementation guide.

How Brompton Uses Maintenance Software, and Where Spreadsheets Still Fit

Maintenance management at Brompton runs on software, with spreadsheets retained for specific tasks where they still earn their place. Philip does not hedge on the question of whether software is needed.

“I couldn’t imagine doing planning maintenance activities without software tools, to be honest.”

Brompton has a maintenance management system in place and is rolling out a mobile app version for work order requests. “Anybody in the office, if they’ve got an issue, they can log on to the app, call the facilities technician, or the production hall, if they’ve got a continuous improvement activity or a safety issue, they can also call one of the maintenance team.”

The bigger prize, for Philip, is data. “It’s absolutely vital for capturing the data. Moving into industry four technologies and how we can be an interconnected factory, I think, is absolutely vital work. We’re starting to use Power BI, and also having a look at artificial intelligence algorithms that look at work orders as well, so it’s all really exciting stuff.”

He is more measured on the role of spreadsheets, which were active in the business when he arrived. “They’ve definitely got a place. In Excel there’s not many technical people that can pick up an Excel chart, whack in a couple of numbers, produce a graph, and you’ve almost got an incident report that other people can view very quickly.”

He uses them for criticality registers in particular. “You can quickly add columns, you can quickly manipulate the data, sort things out into an order, you can put nice conditional formatting in. I’m a really big fan of Excel.”

The ceiling, though, is real. For complex planning workflows, purpose-built preventive maintenance software does the job that a spreadsheet cannot. “For planning complex maintenance activities, it’s not appropriate. Doing a lot of analysis and a lot of data, there’s much better ways of doing it.”

Drawing a Straight Line From Brompton’s Maintenance to Its Brand

Brompton’s defining feature is its fold, and the fold puts maintenance directly into the commercial conversation. Philip is unambiguous about what precision engineering demands of the production line.

“To be able to fold in the neat way it does, you need really good levels of quality, good tolerances. That’s what gives it its uniqueness, and its rugged Britishness as well. It’s a really amazing piece of British engineering that’s made in Britain. It’s the Rolls-Royce of folding bikes, without a doubt.”

That precision puts maintenance squarely in the commercial conversation. “To be able to get the fold, you’ve got to have tight tolerances. If we’ve got jigs and fixtures and machines and tooling that aren’t maintained properly, we’re going to have non-conforming parts.”

The stakes go beyond the factory. “We’ve got customers riding these bikes next to vehicles on busy roads. If they fail, the worst could happen, so we’ve got to make sure that we’re producing really good quality bikes. It will soon go around in the public space if we have mechanical issues with our bike, and people just won’t buy the bike.”

His conclusion is the line every maintenance leader wants the rest of the business to hear: “Without doubt, good maintenance, you can draw a straight line straight to a competitive advantage.”

Philip’s Three Principles for Effective Manufacturing Maintenance

When asked for his top three tips for the listeners, Philip moves away from tactics and lands on three principles for manufacturing maintenance.

The first is people. “It’s working together, joining up with the operations team, quality teams and the maintenance teams together, and knocking down those barriers so there isn’t any friction. You can have those heated debates, that healthy banter that is required on the shop floor and in the facilities area. You want that healthy tension, but with the people working toward the same goal.”

The second is root cause thinking. “We’ve always got to be thinking, why did this happen, and how can we stop that from coming back? Get rid of those assumptions.”

The third is aiming high, even when the target is theoretical. Aiming at zero unplanned downtime points maintenance leaders towards the kind of predictive maintenance approach that uses real-time condition monitoring to catch failures before they happen. “Aiming for perfection. The dream is to get to zero unplanned downtime, zero accidents, zero quality defects. Is it attainable? Not likely. Things fail, and you’ve got to run some assets to failure. We’ve got to have some quality issues somewhere along the line. But should we aim for anything less than that? No, probably not, if that helps us and keeps us accountable and keeps us moving forward.”

Philip’s Final Word on Continuous Improvement in Maintenance

Philip closes with the quote he comes back to most often, and the mindset behind it.

“If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, improve it. I really like that. Really getting into continuous improvement and finding something and leaving it better than when you found it.”
He extends the idea beyond machinery. “If you’re going into a workspace, you clean up behind you. If you go in and do some maintenance on an asset, you leave it much better than where you found it. If you go into the facilities area, my team are walking around the site, I expect them to find things and leave it better than when they found it. It’s about a mindset, really, and continuous improvement.”

Full Transcript

Matt [00:00:29] Hi everyone. Today we’re joined by a fantastic guest Philip Dewson, head of maintenance and facilities with Brompton bicycles. Philip began his career by gaining a Bachelor of Engineering in manufacturing systems engineering from the University of East London, followed by a Master’s in innovative manufacturing from Cranfield University. He then moved into a role as a production supervisor with McCain on their graduate training program, before moving into more engineering management roles with Jordans Ryvita, Kolac snack foods and Crossip drinks. Most recently, Philip has moved away from the food production industry into his current position as head of maintenance and facilities with Brompton bicycles. So welcome to the show, Phil, how’s business?

Philip [00:01:21] It’s great. Thanks very much for having me. I’m really excited because I’m talking to you today.

Matt [00:01:25] Yeah, no worries.

Philip [00:01:26] So business is great in the bicycle industry. And those of you who ride bikes or probably tried to buy bikes over the last year with all the COVID scenarios that we’ve had going on, it’s been really difficult to get a hold of bikes and the Brompton brand is going from strength to strength. There’s a real cycling boom at the moment.

Matt [00:01:46] Yeah, I guess, has COVID impacted that? Obviously, I guess, people aren’t using cars as much because they can’t travel as freely. Do you reckon that is a factor?

Philip [00:01:59] Yes. So people are still really wanting the Brompton brand all over the world. There’s more people living in cities than ever have been. And with COVID people want to avoid public transport. So those people already living in cities are trying to choose bikes to get into work and being able to fold up a bike, take it into the office, take it into your house where people live in cities where space is at a premium as well, this really helps. So in terms of the business, COVID has had a positive impact externally. Internally, it’s been quite a ride I believe. I started with Brompton in November and I think lots of things have changed within the organization. One way system, social distancing. And it’s quite hard to start a new role when everyone’s coming disguised with a mask when you’re going around and trying to speak to people and build those relationships, and half the faces are hidden. I think it looks really good for Brompton as well.

Matt [00:03:00] Yeah, fantastic. Well, so can you tell our audience then what you do and elaborate a little bit more on that?

Philip [00:03:07] Yeah, of course. So I’m responsible for the production assets and the office facilities. So I’ve got the head office function and we’ve got the manufacturing of the bikes. So I’ve got a team of facilities technicians who work for me and a growing team of maintenance engineers. They look after the production assets. So paint plants, we’ve got jigs and fixtures, we’ve got CNC machines, we’ve got lots of hand brasing. And the facility’s had a bit of work. We’re trying to adapt and grow the organization and so there’s a huge influx of people coming to work with us, which is a really exciting time to be. So we’ve also got lots of facilities projects going on, to try and work out how we can best use the space and all the kind of flexibility that’s required for home learning. And I say that because I’ve got kids at home doing home learning and helping our team be able to work from home as well as come into the office when need be.

Matt [00:04:13] Yeah, that’s amazing. I guess that that really helps, especially if you’re a parent, right? So then how would you set a good maintenance culture in the business?

Philip [00:04:25] Well maintenance culture, I think it’s like an operations culture as well. You talked about where I’ve come from. I’ve been working in the food industry for 15 and a half years and then go to Brompton bikes, which is a much much different industry. So I think I’ll always be learning how to set that culture but I do believe that it starts with the team with the people who are there and kind of the culture of how the business operates at the current time. So I always talk about safety, talk about quality, and talk about productivity and maintenance. So they all go hand in hand. So the maintenance culture has got to interface with that. So it’s about having a good team who are engaged in helping to define what’s going on. I sit down with my team as I have done with the guys at Brompton and go through kinds of strengths, weaknesses and opportunities and threats throughout. But you know, basic SWOT analysis always pulls up some good conversations with the team. And they can help set their own culture, what they would like to aspire to be and that becomes the target and the driving force for all the work that we do.

Matt [00:05:41] Well, more often times than not maintenance teams go under the radar as unsung heroes in companies. So how can maintenance managers go about increasing the visibility and recognition of their teams within a business?

Philip [00:05:59] So to bring the visibility of the maintenance team within the organization, you’ve got to exactly do that. You got to find those things that makes the maintenance team kind of visible and appreciated. So some of the things that we’ve done quite quickly within Brompton, we had a dark dingy area around the CNC areas. And so working with the team, and with some contractors, we’ve got the lighting improved, and that is literally a visible improvement in the area. And tying that back to maintenance activities that — so we’ve got the operators who can do the first inspections and that can really tell us some of the problems and issues that are going wrong with their assets right at an early start. So by investing into the area, investing into the operators, and then tying that back to good maintenance practices and getting the information out of the operators at an early point, you can build a good store and there’s good relationships with the area managers and say, look, we want to get the team involved. We understand that with the challenges that you’ve got but let’s work together and get some of these maintenance activities ticked off. So it’s not great to have an asset down. But if you can plan it in with the area managers, and say, look, we want this asset down for a period of time, get this work done and then really promote it. So things like before and after pictures, I think are really, really important. You can, especially with digital cameras and high-resolution things, you can take some quite interesting images to be able to share with the maintenance teams and with others to show the good work that you have done. So I think that really helps to get the ball moving, and so that you can get some good momentum.

Matt [00:07:48] Okay, great. So then how would you go about planning, maintenance activities?

Philip [00:07:54] Planning maintenance activities, I believe is what it’s all about. And to do that, you need a really good maintenance planner. You need somebody who’s got experience with the culture on the shop floor, who’s got those good relationships with the key stakeholders. There’s got to be a passion for how the business works and how the business operates to be able to build those relationships and work out how best they can get maintenance time planned in. So they need to be close to the shop floor. And also the talking about root cause to people and really drilling into why things have happened to be able to say, okay, is the maintenance working at the moment, can we take things off? Do we need to add anything? So that critical look at the activities that we carry out as a team so they can have that kind of audit perspective. And so that it’s really got to be done by a really good person who can interface with the team. And he’s got good technical skills as well. We’ve got to use software to be able to plan what it is that we need to be doing. There’s a whole lot of data that needs to be looked at as well so we’ve got that eye on the data. And so it really comes to those individuals and planning that time. And we talked about it before around those kinds of cultural questions as well. It’s getting maintenance talked about right at an early level. So we get maintenance planning activities designed in really early on in the lifecycle of the asset so that we understand how much maintenance is going to be required and how much is going to be planned in as soon as that lands on site. You just don’t want an asset to land on-site, thrown in the keys over and then when you feel crack on, you go and maintain it. It needs to be planned out earlier on.

Matt [00:09:44] Yeah. So then how do you implement an effective maintenance plan?

Philip [00:09:51] It’s a good question because it does change on what the asset is and what the requirement is. I wouldn’t have said there’s a one way of doing it. So it’s not a single brush in. This is how we got into the maintenance plan over the whole of the site. One of the things I’m looking at for Brompton about the maintenance plan that we’re doing the moment, it started from a criticality view. So what are the assets that are most critical on-site? I’ve been working with a team of production guys, and with the manufacturing engineers, with my team, and we’ve got to be bringing in the quality engineers as well. So kind of a broad team approach to look at what the critical things are, both in kind of a scoring mechanism and also what is keeping the area managers awake at night? What are they worried about that’s going to go on and impact their production output. And then someone’s got to look at those critical assets, look at the common failure modes, what’s rotating, what’s moving high frequency, what parts of the machine are the operators interfacing with? Because where are the operators’ interface, that’s where you’re likely to get some failures. For us, we have operators put in stainless steel parts into the machines. So it’s asking, how could they knock them? What the clamping mechanisms are and things like that? So we have a look at criticality. And I think it’s important that we don’t over plan so that we don’t have a maintenance management system that is full of maintenance tickets, and we’re looking at it going okay, we’re maintenance planners. Where you’ve got a heap load of tickets, got a lot of planned maintenance but it’s not been done. So really, rigorously having a look at that to make sure that we’re not over planning and under-delivering?

Matt [00:11:43] Yeah. And so talking about planning, do you think software tools are useful for managing maintenance activities in a business?

Philip [00:11:51] Yeah. I couldn’t imagine doing planning maintenance activities without software tools to be honest. Yeah. So we’ve got the maintenance management software. And we’ve got the mobile phone app version that we’re rolling out, work request tickets that we’re going to be rolling out for the facilities team. And so anybody in the office, if they’ve got an issue, they can log on to the app, call the facilities technician or the production hall, if they’ve got a continuous improvement activity or a safety issue, they can also call one of the maintenance team. I think it’s absolutely vital for capturing the data. So moving into kind of industry for technologies and how we can be an interconnected factory I think is absolutely vital work. We’re starting to use Power BI, and also having a look at artificial intelligence algorithms that have a look at work orders as well so it’s all really, really exciting stuff.

Matt [00:12:51] Yeah. And so obviously, that’s kind of the new school take. What’s your take on the old school using spreadsheets for maintenance management? Do you still do that or what’s your kind of take on that?

Philip [00:13:05] Well, in the business, there are spreadsheets in place and reasonably active as I’ve been coming into the, into the process. And it’s a starting point. I mean, in Excel there’s not many technical people that can pick up an Excel chart, wack in a couple of numbers produce a graph, and you’ve almost got an incident report that other people can view very quickly. So they’ve definitely got the place. I talked about asset criticality, criticality registers in Excel. You can quickly add columns, you can quickly manipulate the data, sort things out into an order. You can put nice Conditional Formatting in. I’m a really big fan of Excel, but for planning complex maintenance activities, it’s not appropriate and then doing a lot of analysis and a lot of data, there’s much better ways of doing it.

Matt [00:13:54] Yeah. So they have their place. So how do you use maintenance then in business as a competitive advantage?

Philip [00:14:07] So if you think of Brompton bikes, and I suppose anybody listening doesn’t know if you go on Google, you’ll see pictures come up galore of people folding bikes and and it’s the mother of all folding bikes. And to be able to fold in the neat way it does, you need really good levels of quality, good tolerances, and that’s what gives it its uniqueness and its I suppose, its rugged Britishness as well. It’s really amazing piece of British engineering that’s made in Britain.

Matt [00:14:41] The first one in the world, is it? I mean I don’t know much about folding bicycles but is it the first one in the world made in the UK or was it taken from somewhere else? What’s the kind of history behind it?

Philip [00:14:54] I should probably know the answer to that. It’s the best one in the world without doubt.

Matt [00:15:06] It’s the best one. That’s what important.

Philip [00:15:09] It’s the Rolls Royce of folding bikes, without a doubt. And so to be able to get the fold, you got to have tight tolerances. And if we’ve got jigs and fixtures and machines and tooling that aren’t maintained properly, we’re gonna have non-conforming parts. And we’ve got customers riding these bikes next to vehicles on busy roads. If they fail, the worst could happen so we’ve got to make sure that we’re producing really good quality bikes. It will soon go around in the public space if we have mechanical issues with our bike, and people just won’t buy the bike. So it is, without doubt, good maintenance, you can draw a straight line straight to a competitive advantage.

Matt [00:15:58] Yeah, sure. And so what are your top three tips for our listeners, then on effective maintenance?

Philip [00:16:06] Three tips? I was going through this. I was thinking, I can list loads of different things that are good for effective maintenance. But the first thing that came to my mind was it’s the people aspects. It’s working together so it’s joining up with the operations team, quality teams and the maintenance teams together and knocking down those barriers so there isn’t any friction that you can have those heated debates, that healthy banter that is required and in the shop floor and in the facilities area. You want that kind of healthy tension but with the people working toward the same goal. And also I like to think of root cause. So we’ve always got to be thinking that, okay, why did this happen and how can we stop that from coming back? Even when I get down to the root cause as long as we start to think more than what can be seen in front of us and get rid of those assumptions. And it’s kind of aiming for perfection so the dream is to get to zero, unplanned downtime, zero accidents, zero quality defects. Is it attainable? Not likely. Things fail, and you got to run some assets to failure. We’ve got to have some quality issues somewhere along the line, but should we aim for anything less than that? No, probably not if that helps us and keeps us accountable and keeps us moving forward. So I say, working together thinking of root cause and aiming for really good standards.

Matt [00:17:39] Okay. That’s great. And so the final question here, then is what’s your favourite saying or quote on maintenance?

Philip [00:17:48] So, you know, I’ve found thinking this one of the most challenging things to think about. So I think it’s about a continuous improvement mindset really. So there’s one quote that I really like is, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, improve it, I really like that. So really getting into continuous improvement and finding something and leaving it better than when you found it. If you’re going into a workspace, you clean up behind you. If you go in and doing some maintenance on an asset, you leave it much better than where you found it. If you go into the facilities area and my team are walking around the site, I expect them to find things and leave it better than when they found it. So it’s about a mindset really and continuous improvement.

Matt [00:18:37] Wow. That’s fantastic. Well, thanks very much for being a guest on the show and dropping some serious knowledge there for our listeners.

Philip [00:18:47] Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure talking to you. Feel free to contact me.

Matt [00:18:53] Yeah, fantastic. Okay, guys. Well, thank you very much for tuning in again. It’s great to have you here with us and we’ll see you on the next one.