People Focus | Richard Fathers

The MCP Team

An organisations’ Team is integral to its success.

That is most certainly true, here at MCP.

Building our Team over the years has been paramount to our ability to provide support services to a variety of industries, for a wide range of maintenance issues. Our Team brings together diverse expertise, they foster collaboration and innovation, enable efficient resource allocation, ensure quality assurance, enhance client engagement and promote adaptability.

Collective Intelligence

By leveraging the collective intelligence and collaboration of our Team, we have been able to deliver exceptional results to our clients and maintain our competitive edge, in this demanding industry.

Our people make MCP who we are and we wanted to dedicate a series of blogs promoting just some of the amazing individuals who make up our Team. This is their chance, in their own words, to highlight their expansive experience in the maintenance and engineering industry so you, our customer, can see where the true added value is in working with us.

Richard Supported ABP to Achieve AMIS World-Class

First Up - Richard Fathers | MCP Managing Consultant since 2015

Early Career

My Engineering Career started many years ago, as a Marine Engineer Officer Cadet. I completed a four-year apprenticeship at South Shields Marine and Technical College, including sea time. Unfortunately, with the decline in British Merchant shipping at this time, on completion of the apprenticeship, I decided to progress my career in an alternative direction. I have to say that I consider the syllabus that I followed on the apprenticeship gave me a great overall understanding of all engineering trades and management principles, including finance. After all, in the middle of the ocean you are pretty much on your own when having to make decisions!

A Change of Direction

Changing career direction turned out to be more difficult than I had first envisaged. I attended interview after interview to be told I was either over-qualified, or that I had no experience. To be fair the inexperience was very true!

Eventually I attended an interview, taken by an ex-Royal Navy Engineer, who liked my training. Subsequently, I was awarded the position of Maintenance Engineer at a Food Business called Tinsley Foods, in South Lincolnshire. Boy was I green though! I was trained on very large diesel engines, turbines and pumping systems and then asked to fix a Weigh Price labeller!

It may have taken a while to get up to speed but eventually I could fix the Weigh Price Labeller and the stretch wrapper and pretty much everything else. Who would Production call? Me! I fixed things quickly, I had become a good engineer.

Moving Up the Ladder

I transferred to a new factory, on the same site which was predominantly empty. This was a good move because then I could fill it. I was involved in purchasing new equipment, and there was a lot of it. We did a lot of early development work on bagged salads, pot salads, sandwich production, vegetarian recipe dishes and on fried products. I started to learn, quickly, about many, many different processes. I had to, as it was only me!

The business began to grow and so, the maintenance team had to grow. All of a sudden, I was a Maintenance Supervisor employing a team of engineers. With continued growth, I became an Engineering Manager, now managing a team of maintenance engineers. I was pretty good to be fair, well my internal customers were generally pretty happy, anyway. But was I? How did I know what good was? I didn’t. How can you aim to go somewhere if you don’t know where it is? I then became Chief Engineer for the site and four factories. What training had I had to hold such a position, other than my apprenticeship for managing the engineering on a ship?

The Reactive World

Sadly, the business closed, not because it wasn’t good at what it did, for other reasons. As I was doing pretty well, I continued with this career path working for a number of food businesses in engineering and operational roles. I continued in this, predominantly reactive world, for 30 years, chalking up 25 years of management experience in the food industry.

Through the years I gained an extremely good range of experience, across a wide range of equipment and processes. I had experience of managing numerous teams of individuals, in highly stressful environments. However, even with all this experience and knowledge, in terms of Manufacturing Engineering Best Practice or Asset Management Best Practice, I still didn’t know what good was.

On Site Maintenance Management Training — Richard Delivering On-Site Client Training

Going Green

When I joined MCP, it all felt new to me, I was all green again! I attended all their City & Guilds courses; Maintenance Best Practice, Maintenance Planning and Scheduling, Spares and Materials Management. I joined the Institute of Asset Management and attended a number of their annual conferences. Subsequently, achieving a Certificate in Asset Management and a Diploma in Asset Management. Now I had a good idea of what ‘good’ looked like!

Most importantly, I started to conduct Asset Maintenance Improvement Assessments (AMIS) for clients at their premises. This included organisations in the pharmaceutical, building materials, food and drink sectors (there is a big difference between the food and drink sectors!). Finally - I was able to use all my acquired knowledge, alongside my extensive experience within these assessment processes.

Looking Good

Now I know what ‘good’ looks like. Through my work, I can support and coach businesses, from a variety of sectors, to achieve maintenance improvements, based on industry benchmarks and best practices, using a structured, methodical approach. We (myself, MCP and our clients) all have the same aim - to make equipment more reliable, become more productive and energy efficient, increase profits and most importantly - provide a safe and enjoyable working environment.