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Lean Maintenance: Best Practices to Turn Asset Management into a Profit Center
Lean Manufacturing is also known as :
Lean Maintenance,
Lean Maintenance Toolbox,
Lean Maintenance System,
Lean Production,
Demand Flow Technology,
Lean Services,
Lean Software Development,
Value Network,
Industrial Technology,
Industrial Engineering,
Quality Control,
Production and Manufacturing,
Lean Dynamics,
value stream mapping,
Lean Manufacturing Solutions,
Lean Resources ,
Lean Product Development,
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Lean Maintenance: Factors for Success
- Finding Maintenance Success Factors: The Gathering of Ideas
- Areas Most A ected By Lean Maintenance Efforts
- The Role of Technology
- Conclusion
- About Infor
Introduction
"In an effort to view maintenance as a positive activity, it is important to see it as a profit center
instead of a cost center. A cost-center approach is strictly concerned with adhering to the budget
and decreasing expenses as much as possible. In contrast, the profit-center model realizes that
investment and operating costs can be allocated to improve efficiency. This increased efficiency
naturally results in higher profits."
One of the most popular buzz-words in business today is "lean." This term conveys the idea of fat
elimination - the elimination of enterprise waste, the streamlining of processes to increase
productivity, and the more e cient use of capital assets and valued personnel in the pursuit of
continuously improving bottom lines. There is, of course, nothing new in this concept. More than
200 years ago, Benjamin Franklin urged the reduction of waste in government, industry, and even
private lifestyles. Dr. W. Edwards Deming brought the power of numbers to "leanness" with his
statistical process control innovations and his 14 principles for management improvement. Shigeo
Shingo revamped Demings' ideas to provide the Toyota Method of manufacturing - a substantial
step toward refined leanness. Dr. James Womack, founder of the Lean Enterprise Institute, further
refined leanness in his books The Machine That Changed the World (Macmillan/Rawson Associates,
1990), Lean Thinking (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Seeing The Whole: mapping the extended value
stream (Lean Enterprise Institute, 2001), Lean Solutions (Simon & Schuster, 2005).
From Franklin through Womack to today's business environment, the idea of leanness has been
applied to a greater or lesser degree to all business processes. However, when one reads most of
the literature available on lean business practices, the material woefully neglects the maintenance
processes that are relied upon to keep companies and enterprises running consistently, reliably,
and profitably. This is not to say that the above giants of leanness ignore maintenance.
Nonetheless, the bulk of leanness authors group maintenance in a bundle with "other processes"
and rarely o er tools specifically addressing lean methodologies with respect to the maintenance
e ort. This lesser valuation of the maintenance process is mirrored by the view of maintenance
held by corporate management in general. It is common knowledge that asset downtime disrupts
production and drives up both process and per unit operating costs. Executives often lose sight of
this because they focus on output, not on the assets used to create it. As one CFO put it,
"Companies care about how many widgets they make, not the widget machine." The irony is that
companies can use asset performance management in implementing lean maintenance
techniques not only to make more widgets, but to make each widget more profitably.
This paper provides concrete suggestions and identifies specific areas within the maintenance
process where companies and enterprises can reduce waste, increase reliability, and view the
maintenance e ort as an integral part of a lean business posture.
Lean Maintenance: Factors for Success
"The genius of lean manufacturing is its simplicity. The doctrine appears to preach the obvious:
Limit waste, keep a clean work space and encourage employees to seek efficiencies. The
challenge of lean is its totality. The concept asks companies to cut waste across the production
process, from material ordering to packing and shipping as well as throughout every department,
from human resources to sales."
Totality. When one discusses ways to improve maintenance practices, inevitably the discussion
splits into compartmentalized topics. Parts inventory, preventive maintenance scheduling, trade
and skill management, tool costs, breakdown management, and the like tend to dominate small
parcels of the discussion. Womack, Shingo, Deming, and their compatriots would cringe at such
siloed conversation because the heart and soul of contemporary lean management - in
maintenance or any other endeavor - is indeed the totality of the coverage. Top-down, bottom-up,
sideways - the maintenance process requires much more than a single approach. An energetic,
e ective enterprise recognizes the connectivity of issues that a ect maintenance e ciency and
ultimate success and include a broad spectrum of solutions. In addition, e ective leanness in
maintenance - like all other areas of the enterprise - requires continuous review, evaluation, and
improvement. Because a static maintenance process is a maintenance process that is gathering
new forms of waste and ine ciency.
Finding Maintenance Success Factors:
The Gathering of Ideas
When attempting to accomplish the goal of "getting lean" in the maintenance arena, a company
must gather all stakeholders together and open up an evaluation process that covers all aspects of
maintenance. This includes bringing in the customers of the maintenance process -the
assemblers, parts storeroom managers, shipping foremen, and even product designers and
engineers. This is because each of these groups of persons sees a di erent aspect of the
maintenance picture (or should see an aspect!).
This may sound like a gathering of hundreds. Not quite. Meetings of a ected personnel should
remain of manageable size while still gathering pertinent input. Discussion should be open and
controlled " managed by a flexible moderator well versed in all aspects of the group. The general
agenda for the discussions should be published well in advance so that participants come
prepared rather than simply showing up for a free-for-all chat session. White boards and flip charts
are musts " so that ideas can be recorded in clear view of participants. The overriding aim is to
identify problems and suggest solutions.
Note that upper management participation is required. Deming, Shingo, Womack, and
contemporary authorities on enterprise process improvement agree that without upper
management buy-in, the e ort of organizing for leanness is doomed to fail. In fact, Deming and
Womack go so far as to identify management as the number one barrier to successful process
revision. Too often management lives in its own world - the world of quarterly performance,
quick-fix, and top-down directive that is not supported by an intimate knowledge of the in-thetrenches
processes upon which they depend. This isolates management from the core of the
business - and that is a recipe for failure. A recent Aberdeen Group survey found that more than
70% of survey respondents report that their maintenance departments function on a stand-alone
basis. At the same time, 87% of respondents report that asset maintenance is very or extremely
important to their organizations overall financial performance, but only 7% are completely satisfied
with their maintenance performance. Without energetic management participation in the "leaning"
of maintenance processes, improving the maintenance process becomes an up-hill battle.
Needless to say, successful meetings reveal weaknesses in processes. The most successful
meetings also find viable remedies for weaknesses - and find ways of improving numerous
processes whether they were identified as "weaknesses" or not. With the full support of all
levels of management, the results of these meetings can be organized into an overarching
improvement plan and published to all stakeholders. In addition to setting directions, such
publication provides invaluable feedback to participants - recognizing and reinforcing their
valuable contributions to the improvement process. Often this is the di erence between blind
following of orders and the flexible, alert, agile commitment to a team-oriented goal.
Areas Most A ected By Lean Maintenance E orts
Realize that there is no concrete list of improvements that can be provided in the blind to revamp a
typical business. That is because there is no such thing as a typical business. Each enterprise
has its own superlatives and laggards. Specific areas within the maintenance arena do, however,
lend themselves to generally similar examination.
- Spare Parts Inventory Management:Most parts storerooms contain a substantial number of
excess or obsolete parts. Often these parts add up to a 6- or 7-figure investment that languishes
within the maintenance budget. An enterprise must optimize its parts inventory so that parts
are available for preventive and corrective maintenance without gathering dust worthlessly on
shelves and in storage areas. Such optimization requires communications between storeroom
managers, purchasers, and maintenance personnel (foremen and technicians). Discussions
center on parts usage, maintenance routines, anticipated demands, and historical usage
data. In a multi-site enterprise, the discussion must include options to centralize expensive,
critical, and seldom-used items. Although this is a parts issue, stakeholders must be open to
suggestions for altering maintenance operations scheduling to permit more control and less
waste in the parts inventory management regimen.
- Preventive Maintenance Management:A quality preventive maintenance program is the
cornerstone of a quality maintenance program. For ages the benchmark budget has been 90%
for PM activities and 10% for corrective/breakdown maintenance. Anything less indicates urgent
need for improvement - because larger spending on corrective maintenance also means greater
number of unplanned equipment shutdown, greater equipment wear, and lessened equipment
useful life. In today's stringently competitive business world, preventive maintenance must
be further refined. Examine predictive maintenance, reliability-centered maintenance, and
risk-based inspection management to tailor PM activities for critical assets. Use historical
maintenance and breakdown data to facilitate this important tailoring.
- Cross-Training Personnel:Earlier we emphasized that lean maintenance is a totality. This
means that maintenance personnel must become more flexible in their skills. This does not
mean a plumber must qualify as an electrician. It does mean that the plumber should become
well versed in plumbing systems and potential associated problems in his/her areas of
responsibility. The plumber learns about important switchboards, conduits, and power supplies;
the electrician learns about important valves, piping, pumps, and reservoirs. The result: a much
more savvy workforce that is more prepared to recognize potential problems before those
problems impact operations.
- Continuous Improvement Throughout the Maintenance Spectrum:Once lean methodology
is initiated, all stakeholders must buy-in and contribute not just at the outset, when progress
can be most visible, but as a part of daily routines. That is why cross-training personnel can
provide the impetus for continued reduction in wasted time, e ort, material, and production
capacity. Each member of the maintenance team must be encouraged and empowered to
initiate improvements. All such initiatives should be recorded and tracked to quantify true
improvements and to ensure that the initiatives continue to match the overall goals of the
maintenance program - and the goals of the business. Continued upper-level management
support and involvement is critical if only to apply on-going push toward greater successes in
the leanness e ort. It is all too easy for an organization to slip into complacency and allow the
successes of leanness to be lost in the fog of routine. Dr. Womack uses Lucas PLC, a British
supplier of mechanical and electrical components to the automotive and aerospace industries,
as an example of how a highly successful and once-lean enterprise can return to wasteful
practices because of loosening leanness commitment over time. It took Lucas a period of
seven years to slip away from lean practices. The message here: Never relax in the e ort to trim
waste and streamline practices.
Hand-in-hand with these improvements comes refined purchasing methodology. Most storerooms
employ computerized systems that govern parts ordering. Consider supplier consolidation within
that scheme so that the power of volume purchasing can be brought to bear on supplier pricing.
For multi-site enterprises this can reap large rewards in the form of cost savings, better supplier
service, and lower inventory holdings.
In addition, facilitate much greater communication between line maintenance personnel and
PM planners and managers. Why? To generate a flexible preventive maintenance program
that is prepared to use any opportunity to accomplish PM activities that may be coming due.
Such opportunities include equipment breakdowns and equipment changeovers. By taking
advantage of an unplanned shutdown, PM managers can save a planned shutdown, thus
improving overall productivity. PM activities should be scheduled to coincide with equipment
changeovers and other planned shutdowns when possible.
The Role of Technology
"The lean model stresses an evolutionary process of change and adaptation, not an idealized
technology-driven end state." Defense Acquisition University
Lean maintenance is not the same thing as the acquisition of more and more technology. That is a
conceptual error committed by far too many businesses in making huge investments in new
equipment, software, and hardware, believing that they are solving problems by such purchases.
Such a path is, of course, counterproductive to the lean model.
That having been said, we must now stress that technology does have a role in the progress toward
greater leanness in the maintenance process. Recall grains of thought embedded in the above
factors a ected by lean maintenance e orts. In each case we call for the gathering of and analysis
of data to support lean activities. Tracking parts usage and cost trends, automated/tailored parts
purchasing, recording and evaluating e ectiveness of preventive maintenance and the associated
trends in breakdown occurrence, the recording of personnel cross-training results, and especially
the on-going tracking of lean e orts to document progress, identify additional areas for
improvement, and to police past e orts to ensure no back-sliding.
Where does technology belong in this scheme? Nearly all successful business enterprises
employ enterprise asset management (EAM) software applications. Primarily these applications
manage work assignment through various methods. Quality EAM o erings provide integration
between the maintenance e ort and spare parts inventory management. Excellent o erings
include a variety of data requirements associated with maintenance activities so that each activity
provides building-block information that leads to trend and event analysis. And the very best EAM
products integrate storeroom, repair, preventive maintenance planning, and purchasing functions
with numerous additional lean-oriented technologies such as mobile connectivity, bar code
technology, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, and automated communications
features such as email, pager, and operating screen notifications to key personnel. The inclusion
of key performance measurements is a must to ensure that leanness goals are being
accomplished. Businesses should also look for a separate analytical capability that is incorporated
within the EAM umbrella. Clearly these capabilities contribute both to the streamlining of the
maintenance work process and to the gathering of critical performance, cost, and productivity
information. A business should seek technology only as it contributes to these corporate goals.
Conclusion
Lean maintenance is mostly about people, their functions, and their contributions to the
business processes that make up the associated enterprise. In this paradigm, the role of upper
management is, therefore, crucial to the success of the leanness e ort. Without energetic,
agile, flexible, insightful leadership, the lean maintenance e ort will struggle - or fail. Everyone
in the business concern is a stakeholder. And every stakeholder needs to be empowered to
accomplish leanness maintenance goals. Those goals, of course, must be aligned to the goals
of the enterprise itself.
About Infor
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visit www.infor.com.