Six Areas of focus for Lean Maintenance in companies that strive for World Class
Lean is both a top down and bottom up activity. It is top down in the sense that the best implementations are driven by a company’s ethics and culture. Even high-level personnel are involved in the Lean efforts. These efforts are on manager’s lips whenever they speak. Lean can also be thought of as bottom up. In most projects, the personnel closest to the action know intimately where the waste is. After all the workers are the ones to sweep it up, or it is generally their time that is wasted.
Along the way management has developed new attitudes toward maintenance activity. The best organizations realize that, although some maintenance is inevitable, a proper attitude is necessary to minimize their exposure (in other words their downtime, parts costs, and labor costs). They also realize that maintenance has above-the-waterline costs and below-the-waterline costs (that become evident when maintenance is cut too far). The below-the-waterline costs can dwarf the other costs. In short, these organizations view maintenance activity in a particular way. This new view happens also to support Lean initiatives.
•Management wants a maintenance department that is more proactive and less reactive. Reactive maintenance is the fattest of all types of maintenance activity. Finding a problem, planning the solution, and solving it (hopefully once and for all, if possible), is less expensive in the end than having the problem find you (over and over again). This truism is fundamental to Lean maintenance. Any repetitive unplanned, unscheduled, disruptive, event is by definition Fat.
•Part of the proactive approach is don’t wait for breakdowns to mess up production, get out there and find deterioration before failure. The big money is below the water line, so use all techniques and technology to preserve production. Use non-interruptive inspection techniques, or well-timed, scheduled outages (but work diligently to reduce their duration) to detect performance degradation and potential failure points.
•Once something is broken, apply root cause analysis (RCA) to manage the cause, not just the symptom (the failure). Structured RCA is one of the most powerful Lean techniques and will be covered later, in its own section.
•Less repetitive maintenance effort is better (this includes repetitive PM activity)—solve problems permanently where they don’t break or even need PM either.
In the old days, managements were cowardly because they hid behind their ignorance.
•They wanted the results of advanced maintenance management practices without the investment. So Management didn’t put their money (or authorized downtime) where their mouth was. If they read in a trade magazine that PM was a good idea or PdM was the way to go they asked for PM/PdM without providing adequate financing, support, or in-depth training. They thought that by yelling loud enough, or setting big enough goals, the machines would be motivated to not break.
•What happened was that marketplaces became more global, with tough new competitors, and that left no room for amateurs. Judicious long-term maintenance investment made winners. All of a sudden you find you are in competition with a factory with half your labor rates. It takes courage to face that, do the tough work necessary, and some luck to end up the winner.
•Every part of the company has expertise. Utilizing these islands of expertise is essential for success. Management is listening to maintenance opinions, and factoring those opinions into large business decisions. Using your experts to their best ability is Lean.
•Like any change, if management wants improved maintenance they must fund it, and care about it for a significant period of time.
Maintenance has to face some responsibility also. There is a culture of deception in maintenance because it didn’t seem that management could take the truth. In those old days, maintenance folks hid what was really going on in the maintenance department from management. Now the spotlight is uncomfortable because it is on maintenance, and it is looking for hard numbers. All through the company, hard numbers are king.
•Why? To see what is really going on. Secondly, numbers are used to measure continuous improvement (or lack thereof) and Lean project progress. Remember, hard numbers measure real savings and real improvement, and not phantom savings.
•Productivity is now secondary to results. The focus is simultaneously on doing a thing right and on doing the right thing. In fact, world-class organizations realize that high productivity is a function of doing many small things right. Management really wants results on the larger cost area below the water line (such as uptime, and reliability). The world-class organization’s management wants high productivity, low waste, and more sophisticated management of maintenance from the maintenance leadership.
•World-class organizations have an increasing willingness to use sophisticated tools of statistics, finance, and accounting, in maintenance analysis. Sometimes the only way to see the fat is through sophisticated tools and processes.
•Management is starting to require analysis-driven maintenance decision-making, not seat-of-the-pants-driven maintenance decision-making. The analysis can uncover non-obvious Fat. The key is making rational decisions backed by data that can be reviewed (and understood) by a manager without a lifetime of maintenance experience.
Great maintenance managers have realized that how people are used is the key to success. If W.E. Deming taught us anything it was that the system you operate in is sometimes more important than the people, and that the right people are your major asset. Good people with a bad system will be thwarted and demoralized.
•Your system should encourage ad hoc teams to solve problems. Teams solve problems, and are dissolved when the problem is solved. Problems are like the fat you trim off your steak before you cook it.
•Barriers limit thinking. Limited thinking gets in the way of Lean thinking. You can observe the fading of traditional departmental barriers (letting people see more of the big picture to make better decisions).
•Who knows better what the customer really needs than the customer? Where appropriate, World Class companies encourage customer participation in Maintenance (with training, and with proper management called TPM).
•Information in the right hands makes Lean decisions possible. Information sharing includes things like sharing charge-back rates, machine part costs, and the maintenance budget (for starters).
The world has changed. It moves more quickly now, so that only nimble competitors survive. Nimbleness is a function of the right systems driving the right people. The right people have the right attitude as well as the right competencies. In fact, almost all problems are really people problems masquerading as maintenance problems.
•If people are your only asset then it is prudent to invest in your people through continual training to improve the effectiveness of this asset. Although competence of your people is tough to measure directly, you know when it is not present! When it is present, things run smoothly. Frequently smooth running is Lean.
•Layoffs are the bane of the maintenance department. If you’ve been following the advice to train people every year, you have a substantial investment in them. It takes years to develop the expertise of a laid-off maintenance worker. We also want to be damn sure that nothing within our control gets in the way of our people’s concentration. Fear of layoffs is handled perhaps with a smaller core crew, and supplemented with contract help. Commitment is to people, so that every other option is looked at before layoffs (W.E. Deming says “drive out fear”).
•Cross training (also known as multi-skilling) is a goal to improve both productivity and the personal sense of satisfaction. Cross training is under utilized. Due to fear in Union environments and laziness elsewhere it is rare to see concrete programs and incentives for cross training. With proper safeguards (on quality and competence) cross training can boost productivity dramatically. Being able to send one person instead of two is Lean.
•The Attachment is to the people rather than technology or computer systems. CMMS and other systems have come a long way in the last 2 decades but none of the systems can operate without human intelligence driving them.