Over the last decade, the manufacturing sector has witnessed various shifts in the way it operates. Among the myriad of trends witnessed by manufacturers, the retirement/replacement of a skilled workforce and their resulting vacancies are causing inefficiencies in equipment management, maintenance, and operations. This issue causes business-critical challenges for the pulp and paper arena, a sector heavily reliant on legacy systems, which faces significant downtime due to the lack of competent professionals capable of enhancing asset reliability and effectively minimizing equipment failures. Further compounding this problem is the underserved supply of union skilled trades experts and certified maintenance technicians, leaving pulp and paper organizations to run shorthanded, accept equipment losses, or explore outsourcing opportunities. Today, the most readily available skilled trades personnel are certified experts in one specific skill set; therefore, their ability to solve highly complex maintenanceissues is often myopic and can only be considered as a ‘quick-fix’ or ‘band-aid’ solution for the challenges firms usually face.

The question that remains is: How can a pulp andpaper manufacturer ensure minimal downtime and highest efficiencies without the need to worry about their reliability processes and lack of skilled tradespersons?

Michigan-based Pro Services has invested and worked tirelessly for nearly 4 decades to provide a solution to this pervasive challenge. Their answer to this question, gained through earnest experience in delivering the highest quality craftsmanship across all skilled trades and industrial reliability technician services for decades, is the first-of-its-kind Department of Labor-approved maintenance technician apprenticeship program. Pro Services is a multi-skilled trade contractor providing contract mechanical services including, pipefitters and welders, plumbers, millwrights, ironworkers,and multi-crafted industrial reliability technicians, to industrial, commercial, and residential customers alike nation-wide. Pro Services Flagship offering of union skilled trades experts with fully managed and staffed outsourced maintenance services (Pro FMT) is their fix-all solution to the current maintenance crisis. Through the deployment of these programs, Pro Services helps their clients improve asset reliability and productivity via the deployment of comprehensive maintenance & reliability solutions engineered to boost the efficiencies of production equipment, ancillary process support equipment, and all other facility systems. “Unlike most contracting service vendors that only offer services geared toward specific skilled labor work, we offer an expansive suite of services that are built to help manufacturers holistically address their equipment reliability, maintenance, scheduling, and operations-related inefficiencies,” says Michael VandeMaele, founder and CEO, Pro Services.

A Genesis Powered by Passion

Founded in 1987, the genesis of Pro Services goes back to VandeMaele’s youth, when he was fresh out of high school and entered the U.A. apprenticeship program to become a certified plumber, pipefitter, and welder. After completing his program, VandeMaele worked at several companies as a skilled trades professional and recognized more often than not, he was not equipped (information-wise and/or toolkit-wise) to deliver the full value his customers sought. This realization burrowed deeper into his mind when he experienced the multiple trades and steep prices his clients had to stomach in order to restart their operations after an equipment/process failure.

“Ironically, I come from a family of skilled labor professionals and paper manufacturers. So, the disparity that existed between the need for efficient maintenance operations and the lack of cost-effective solutions did not sit right with me,” adds VandeMaele. Therefore, he started Pro Services as a mechanical skilled trades contractor with a mission to ensure impactful and cost-effective maintenance-related resources to the pulp and paper industry.

Subsequently, when more and more customers began pleading for Pro Services to assign (on a semi-permanent basis) their team of seasoned skilled trades professionals for their mounting maintenance needs, VandeMaele began to dig deeper into the problem. Finally, intended as a longer-term solution for the problem, he launched his company’s Pro University and developed an apprenticeship program to educate multi-crafted reliability and maintenance personnel equipped to handle the full breadth of critical industrial maintenance nuances. Despite VandeMaele’s epiphany, it took years of development effort for Pro Services to get their curriculum approved by the U.S. Department of Labor, as most apprenticeship programs at the time took at least four years to complete; while Pro Service’s apprenticeship initiative is based upon two-years of coursework. “We leveraged leading educational practitioners, developed our technical curriculum in-house, and backed it all with studies performed by leading training organizations to ensure alignment with the latest industry trends and regulatory mandates, which further increased its chances of gaining approvals from relevant entities,” states VandeMaele.

Delivering Impactful Maintenance

Today, Pro Services’ Pro FMT United States D.O.L. Journeyman Maintenance Apprenticeship includes in-house classroom, laboratory, and hands-on experience, followed by on-the-job training at a client facility. After completion of the two-year program, apprentices are awarded their Maintenance Mechanic Journeyman Card, which they can utilize to stand ahead of their contemporaries as validated maintenance technicians. On the other hand, for maintenance as a service, Pro Services categorizes its service into two parts: People and Process. Initially, the company assesses client teams to identify their reliability and maintenance strengths & weaknesses. Once the company has the information, it educates the personnel to improve their relatively weaker skills, which helps them be better equipped to face future maintenance requirements. Alternatively, instead of a typical computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) that manages, schedules, and tracks maintenance projects, Pro Services chooses a preventive maintenance management system (PMMS) that combines trained people with highly effective processes to boost a client’s ability to predict potential failures and minimize downtime. “Our PMMS approach is designed to work hand-in-hand with a client’s existing CMMS software and delivers drastic minimization of unplanned maintenance downtimes,” explains VandeMaele.

Further discussing the core competencies of its union skilled trades experts and Pro FMT maintenance service, VandeMaele mentions how his company always addresses the prevalent issues faced by on-field maintenance personnel.

As an example, he elaborates on Pro Services’ emphasis on always keeping its field technicians up to date on the latest developments in a client’s manufacturing line by providing dedicated iPads or other mobile devices. Similarly, the company also ensures that the gang and toolboxes it provides are always reinforced and customized with the tools required for a specific project or process. Pro Services also has a dedicated toolbox inventory process that guarantees a kit is perfectly consolidated for the next project without any missing components, which significantly reduces the company’s response time. “Our ability to combine our industry know-how with innovative technology is perfectly illustrated with our use of battery-powered tools, which simplifies a maintenance technician’s tasks while assuring high-quality craftsmanship and value,” explains VandeMaele.

A Culture Built for Customer Excellence

According to VandeMaele, Pro Services is built on four core pillars: safety, integrity, pride, and teamwork. The company’s core values dictate everything, be it hiring or promoting personnel, taking up a new customer project, or managing existing clientele. VandeMaele believes that as long as his company continues to do this and make its customers understand the mission behind their approach to maintenance and skilled trades projects, Pro Services will sustain itself as a leader in theindustry. He further reiterates the impact of its core pillars through the example of Pro Services’ diverse executive management team, which comprises leaders hailing from various backgrounds including core manufacturing, construction management, pulp and paper, and more.

Pro Services’ culture of safety, integrity, pride, and teamwork enable its C-suite to seamlessly collaborate with each other and ensure maximum value to its clients. Additionally, the company prides itself on its team’s 24/7 availability for customers’ demands and rapid response times. The company’s pillars also have an influence on its maintenance apprenticeship program as it does not just test an individual’s skills but also ensures that they are effective in managing and mitigating client shutdowns before validating their certification. “Our ultimate goal is to facilitate the lowest total cost of maintenance and with our skilled trades and maintenance services, we help clients focus on the reliability of their equipment and personnel assets and gain true value,” observes VandeMaele.

A Promising Future

Today, Pro Services has decades strong relationships with the Millwrights union and the UA plumbers & pipefitters union, along with 100+ industrial reliability technicians working in 29 states and a multitude of industries across the U.S. The industrial reliability technicians work in both unionized and non-unionized facilities, proudly represented by the United Steelworkers in the former. As a leader, VandeMaele was awarded the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year for Michigan & Ohio, which is an accolade that highlights an organization’s ability to leverage innovation leading to efficiency and growth. Looking ahead, the company aims to collaborate with like-minded partners and develop metric-driven maintenance excellence programs capable of improving maintenance teams’ efficacy in maximizing asset reliability and minimizing maintenance downtime. To conclude, VandeMaele reiterates the ethos of his company, “We live our culture from the top-down and continually work toward channeling it to help our clients realize their lowest total cost of maintenance.”

With such unmatched capabilities and competencies, Pro Services is perfectly poised to continue making a significant impact on the pulp and paper industry as well as the overall U.S. manufacturing arena for decades to come.