Companies introduced small personal computers. In fact, IBM was an accelerator of the change with the introduction of their IBM PC. That introduction itself was a break from the past because it used standardized instead of (its usual) proprietary parts. The short version of the story was that IBM’s fortunes fell dramatically and the company encountered hard times (for IBM). The company looked fat and without the ability to reach to the marketplace.
Just before the Internet boom, IBM had successfully reinvented itself as global integrators, consultants, and middleware suppliers (software that sits between the operating system and the user applications). The company is now re-invigorated and it looks entirely different from how it did in 1980.It is now a faster, leaner, and extremely effective force in the computer field for large businesses.
We associate fat with laziness. Fat organizations tend to be bureaucratic and inflexible. IBM filled this definition to a ‘T’ before its re-invention. In these organizations it is hard to get stuff done. The focus is more internal (rules, procedures, power) than external (toward customers and market needs). Lean organizations tend to be in action, and have less baggage to carry around, so getting things done is the expression of the company.
Consider the stories of John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil. In the early days, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was known as a Lean producer. Its rapid growth was not all due to his abuses of size and power that caused the government to break up the company. Initially he paid enormous attention to the cost and consequence of every decision. In one story he counted the number of drops of solder it took to seal a barrel. He realized he could get by with fewer drops. Now that is Lean!
Once Rockefeller became powerful and began to use his power to force his competition out of business, history has said, his behavior was unacceptable. He broke the law. “In 1911, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court judgment, and forced Standard Oil to separate into thirty-four companies” (Wikipedia). These companies became the leading oil companies in the world including Exxon-Mobile, Conoco-Phillips, Amoco and Sohio (now part of BP) and others.
The important conclusion is how the successors are oriented toward efficiency and Lean. In fact, none of the 34 companies would be known now as a Lean producer. So from the Lean roots and John D. Rockefeller we have inherited some very fat companies. Their Lean roots aren’t even part of their advertising or identity.
No such thing as Lean
Almost every organization that watched its pennies while they were growing now has trouble in watching its millions. Part of the issue is that there is no such thing as a Lean company. What does this mean? There is no magical place called Lean where you can arrive. There is only a Lean company here and now. More properly, companies move toward or away from Lean operations every day.
There is no permanence, just process and direction. Any company that considers itself lean (just like any company that thinks it is world class), is engaged in self deception. In a moment the leaders in the industry will fall and the followers will lead (or people who just entered the industry and didn’t exist a few years ago will lead everyone). Complacency is the enemy of a truly Lean enterprise. Simple changes in technology tomorrow can open avenues not contemplated by any expert today.
There are hundreds of examples of Fat maintenance. For example, organizations can have too much PM. We remember the words of John Wanamaker (a Philadelphia, PA department store founder in the early 20th century) when he said that he knew that half his advertising was wasted. He said his problem was that he didn’t know which half.
Half of a good PM effort is wasted. Nine tenths of a bad effort is wasted. One thing to consider is, what if you have a machine with a low consequence of failure? Let’s also say the PM cost exceeds the cost of the avoided failure. Is it Fat to PM it, and is it Lean to let it run to failure? For some people, choosing a breakdown strategy would be a scary thought (though it might be the Leanest choice).
Lean is both a continuous and a discontinuous process in that you can develop and improve your leanness by doing training and projects. Lean is discontinuous because as lean as your racks of relays are, they might be the height of fat in comparison to the solid-state world.
There’s a series of steps that make any service or product. Each step adds a little value to the product. This sequence is called the value stream, and it is comprised of all the steps from the identification of the need to the satisfaction of the need. In maintenance, the stream includes the work request or notification, the work order, job planning, coordination, scheduling, execution, and communications. All the subsidiary streams, such as material management, are value streams that flow into the main stream.
Within the value stream there’s a flow from step to step. Our goal is to provide maintenance services without waste or waiting. We want to eliminate both wasted execution and waiting time, and all excess materials. The waiting includes time expended by both the customer and the tradesperson. Let the customer pull value from the provider; customers say when they want the product and what product they want. In the maintenance world, customers define the uptime needed and the quality requirement. Then they schedule windows where maintenance can be provided.
Ideally, lean manufacturing seeks perfection in providing the product with no waste and full value for the manufacturing investment, thus defining lean manufacturing. This definition will be shifted here to suit maintenance.
What are some of the barriers to Lean?
There is resistance to Lean Maintenance. This resistance can be seen in any of the four dimensions (Practices, Attitudes, Technology, and Duration).
1.Reluctance to adopt new technology to solve old problems with known solutions (such as replacing incandescent lamps with compact fluorescent lamps).
2.Concentrating on initial costs and not realizing the cost or time impacts of the waste (such as extended drain intervals of newer oils).
3.Being ignorant in areas where an expert would know of a better product or process (using stabilizer in swimming pools to reduce the use of chlorine).
4.Being complacent.
5.Not being concerned with the efficiency of the process or with the waste produced (particularly when profit margins are high).
6.Resistance when producing waste is cheaper than re-use, re-purpose, or re-cycle.
7.Having all the attention on other targets such as production level, quality, or safety.
8.Having an aesthetic that requires waste (such as an architect wanting a vaulting atrium with glass roof in Arizona).
9.Having an aesthetic that requires obscure products (like lamps that emit certain colors not available in florescent) and not accepting something close.
10.Fun (like having a 300-HP car rather than a 200-HP car).
11.Waste requires less attention and it may be easier to manage than Lean.
12.Unusual quality requirements where useable, almost-good, components are scrapped.
13.Where consumption makes a statement (such as the lagoon in the middle of the desert at the company headquarters).
14.Marketing might drive waste by super-sizing products, which people then throw away in larger amounts.
15.Lack of production planning (like the bakery that over-produces and then has excessive leftovers).
Problem
There is a problem with the notion of Lean Maintenance. The problem is that, if you follow Lean Maintenance through to its logical conclusion, Lean Maintenance really means no maintenance. Or rather, it means no need for maintenance. It means a factory with equipment that doesn’t need to be maintained. Wouldn’t that be the Leanest Maintenance of all? If we could build a manufacturing process that would reliably make a product that didn’t require any maintenance, wouldn’t that be interesting to top management?
After all, maintenance itself (unless you do some interesting manipulations with semantics and logic) does not directly