What is "Lean Maintenance"? 6

[zipthetrip]

I am a maintenance supervisor whose company is going through a $$$ crunch. I have been told to cut corners everywhere. I keep hearing the term "lean maintenance" and I wonder if it is something I could implement to do my part in keeping $$$ costs down. Any suggestions?

 

[bklauba]

Take a look at:

http://www.nwlean.net/maint.htm

BK

 

[BML]

One idea is to try to move as much of the maintenance to the regular shop worker or to have none at all. By this I don't mean skip the maintenance, but instead, see if the equipment can be designed to require less maintenance or less skilled maintenance. Good examples would be using sealed bearings with a permanent lubrication, or having a simple checklist of "turn this dial to point X".

Another thing to look for is to perform maintenance while the equipment is still running. We've got some equipment that needs grease added on a periodic basis, but the grease point is away from the equipment and can be accessed during production.

Finally, depending on how the plant is running, you may want to consider moving maintenance to an off shift. But that really depends on how much the maintenance labor costs vs. the gain in available run time (i.e. higher production volume).

Hope this helps!

 

[mechantaeus]

"Lean Maintenance" is nothing but a company wide Total preventive maintenance" or TPM. As already indicated this procedure involves deleagting as much responsibility to the operator as possible. TPM involved : regular-monthly weekly machine checks, chekclists , standard operating procedure, quality at the source...in shprt it is a mixture many "lean" methods.
It has been my experience that introducing TPM alwasy costs some money but the returns are long lasting....it also calls for full company wide committment.
TPM also calls for making a few custom changes to your equipmwnt, we had lubrication pipe lines neatly piped 2 ft over the floor where they can be serviced, taking care of air leaks etc.
Before you implement all this i would do an OEE (overall Equipment Efficiency) study of your system, you are likely to reduce MTBF (mean time between failure) by implementing TPM. This way you can document a before and after picture.
Hope this helps,

-mechantaeus

Work Hard and Work Smart

 

[automatic2]

The dependibility of your physical plant can be controlled with the application of preventitive maintenance. It can be said/demonstrated that an investment in the later, improves the former. Consider as well, the efficiencies of applying that maintenance. It will directly impact the cost/results relationship. Your job then, as maintenance manager/supervisor is to conentrate on the highest possible efficiencies in applying the maintenance effort. This is your contribution to 'lean maintenance'. Management still must weigh the investment/return scenarios and make certain judgement calls. You of course will be called in to the process to help them understand the relationship.

Consider this, a company is starting a process, and after careful deliberation with engineers and sales persons, invests in technology to perform the process. What are the efficiencies of that technology?. What was the anticipated maintenance budgets over the life of the operation. You'll probably want to generate a revision of this important planning aspect. It will now require management to respond with some difficult answers (your basically asking them to do their job)as to future directions. Some basic needs are; is a particular piece of equipment going to be phased out (meaning a declining maintenance effort on it), is business growth anticipated in certain areas (refocus on bringing equipment up to and beyond capacity), is the there perminent reduction in business that may justify realigning certain processes to increase efficiencies?.

Now that management has given you some firm future visions, you can go about planning how you will increase your efficiencies in supporting those visions.

As mentioned in a previous post, your production team has the same responsibilities to efficiency. You must work with the team to integrate your efforts. Failure on their behalf (production management) however must not deter your cause. In fact it should strengthen it. Call upon your skills to encourage each level of managers to tighten their efficiencies, particularly the highest level manager at your site, cause that's where all those crazy ideas begin.

 

[svanels]

Lean maintenance means do more with less resources

It seems contradictionary but you have to invest in maintenance to achieve that.

If you are cutting on manpower be damn sure what the guy is doing before you let him go.

A lot of companies didn't replace their experienced workers when retiring. When the old mechanic is gone, the compressor that runs trouble-free for 40 years, will break down after six months, because every morning grandpa made his walk-around check and listened for problems... and greased some nipples.

We also went through some bad times.. and we increased our inspections. With the findings we identified problems that would be tackled right away at the next equipment service, or earlier. Don't let Operations tell you that their equipment broke down. Every failure will give a sign (at least most of them), Logsheets, changes in operating conditions, sound, heat etc..

One of the crazy ideas brought-up, was to cut back on PM (preventive maintenance) In our annual budget the cost of PM was about 5% of the cost of IM (incidental or corrective maintenance). We removed some items needed for IM to satisfy the bean counters.

Some more information of the industry your in could give more detailed hints.

Steven van Els
SAvanEls@cq-link.sr

 

[Drazen]

When you think about cutting costs with lean maintenance, it is generally great idea, but you have to take in account one important thing: you will need to even increase cost in the beginning to reap benefits later:

I will sum up the reasons for this shortly:

1. As an experienced maintenance guy wou will not change recent system, which works no matter how effective, until you are not sure that new system will work. That means you will have period when both systems work simoultaneously

2. You need to invest in training at the beginning. Two types of training: organisation and indoctrination (you need to clearly explain to people what the changes are and that is very serious job and they need to be train to work in multi-functional teams that can and must make autonomious decisions for one level of issues) and technical (multiskilling, better flexibility for different tasks)

3. you need to ait for a while until system becomes really and visible useful.


if you "allow" your boss to pull you in fast cost-cutting, you are in serious trouble!

 

[vonbad]

Drazen
Very good point. I would not consider myself an expert in Lean or Six Sigma methology but do have a developed understanding. Many believe that implementing a LEAN practice comes at little or no cost (in many cases some just assume a labor cost to implement).

However it's just not the case. The major savings (based on my experience) with both Lean and Six Sigma really comes in the long run.

In some cases, it's an up front cost. For example, I have worked on projects like this where the up front cost was 10K, but the saving over the next 2 years would have been in the realm of 40K.

 

[tmccann]

Lean Maintenance: To help you frame your thinking because I have been in this jam before is to First ask yourself "Where is the cash going?" - run it likes its your own business.

Reduce cash expenditures for items that sit but don't really need to be in your house. Besides labor.

TPM is an excellent focus but it all depends on what your organization wants to achieve through using it. It is directly related to Gross Margin and ultimately profitability. Yet some tradionalists can't fathom the idea of OEE being a measurement of profit generation. Here is an example:

Current Plant OEE = 50%
Current Sales Revenue = $150 million
Possible plant revenues at 85% OEE = $150 million x 85% ÷ 50%= $255 million - Capacity if demand is there!
Profit margin on incremental sales volume = 30%
Increase in profit = 30% of ($255 million - $150 million) = $31.5 million
35% increase in OEE = $31.5 million
Or each OEE percent increase is worth roughly $1 million


Have you looked at what MRO is costing? I have found organizations that have high quanities of QOH of low velocity consumables which can be easily maintained by a local supplier (but of course if you have a corporate purchasing program that adds cost not value because of "preferred vendors" not the local guys you may be in for a tough haul. Figure out your critical spares they usually require a 90% availabilty rating, non-critical spares usually require 50% availability and can soemtimes be held on site at no cost until used depending on the arrangement you have with your supplier. It is nice to able to have arrangements with all suppliers so in "lean" terms you can push as much of the cost out of your house as possible without ruining high value relationships with local and regional suppliers.

Energy consumption is another area of relatively high expense.

Pareto your expenses highest to lowest - work on the 20% that make up 80% of the total dollar value. If you can't control it or impact it move on to the next. This is a great way to start.

Maintenance is the last to know and the first to go! I know I have been there.