Very often maintenance supervisors feel overwhelmed by the day-to-day disruptions, sometimes crises, that come to them.  It would be a good idea to take a deep breath and consider what they might do to begin the process of minimizing the constant disruption.  Maybe they could start with understanding failure modes, their consequences, and then taking small steps to minimize those failure modes; related to that, having a good understanding of equipment criticality, focusing on those things that matter most to the business; demanding, and supporting, precision maintenance – giving people to tools, time, and training to do a superior job; reinforcing the right behaviors – rewarding excellent work, vs. fast work, for example; holding to the schedule – if you’re always changing it, you don’t really have a schedule, you have a hope, frequently dashed; supporting your team – when someone pushes to get a job done quickly – ask them “Do you want it done fast, or right?”  You have to do things right before you can do them fast; demanding good data and using it openly, reinforcing its value; locating and updating drawings – it’s really frustrating not to have good information available when doing a job; and finally, being the face of equipment reliability, creating an ethos for doing the job right, every time.