Lean Maintenance. Joel Levitt
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maintenance practices worldwide is not enough, so probably the answer is no. But it is unforgivable for any group to not do its part. So, while we cannot solve the problems of global warming, or resource depletion, or any of the other problems ourselves, we will do our part. We can also provide leadership in our organizations for the changes that will work toward solving these problems.
Our part is to make our organizations more efficient in all measures. Every breakdown, every part used, even every unnecessary hour we spend, wastes resources. Although the goal of Lean Maintenance is to save money by cutting costs, this objective is secondary to the bigger game of making our companies and other organizations more responsible in how they conduct themselves.
Our responsibility is to use the fewest resources possible to get the product or service out the door. Being responsible is to leave the environment wherever your facility is, better than how you found it. Acting responsible is to be good and protective toward your neighbors and employees. Responsibility is to have standards and ethics that you follow, even if no one is looking. Finally, we want to be proud of how our organizations and leaders conduct themselves.
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INTRODUCTION TO LEAN MAINTENANCE |
This book is dedicated to the Game of making your product with as few inputs (of all types) as possible, which is part of a bigger game to make your industry sustainable and your organization responsible in the new world of limited resources.
Dedication to fewer inputs is a similarity between this approach to Lean maintenance and other, older approaches. The difference is the reason or driver for the effort. Traditionally the driver is higher profit. Our endeavor is to reduce the use of all resources used to make a product or provide a service. The end result might be the same, but the intention is very different. Higher profits and lower costs of goods sold are the gravy from this process. The meat is being able to produce products with lower and lower levels of inputs, which means consuming fewer resources.
Industry all over the world is getting the message. We want it all! We want wood to build houses and we want forests to visit. We want coal for power and we want clean air; we want low carbon emissions and we want recreational areas after the coal is gone.
In the South African gold fields, a major gold mine is reprocessing their tailings piles because new processes have been developed that can extract gold from the discards of only 10 years ago. Think of the energy and labor savings of not having to mine the ore, or even not having to carry it up the 8700-foot shaft.
A Pacific Northwest saw mill that makes dimensional lumber is getting better yields. After the tree is debarked it is scanned by a laser. A computer calculates the maximum yield from each tree given its shape, size, and length. Yields are up, and we have to cut down fewer trees to provide the same amount of lumber. They even accept the lumber brought down in storms and process it into good 2 X 4s.
Not far from the saw mill is the center of French fry production in the US. A typical plant might process a million and a half pounds of spuds a day. Their imaging systems can see a bad fry as it whizzes by at 30 miles an hour. The bad section gets punched out and fed to the (very happy) local cattle. The French fry producers have managed to use fewer potatoes to make better fries at lower costs. We want it all.
Has maintenance kept up with these improvements? Is maintenance producing the equivalent outcomes by mining the tailings pile, getting out more useful products per tree, or eliminating, even small, imperfections? I think not. I think that maintenance has lagged behind manufacturing in contributing to the efficient and Lean enterprise.
History of Lean maintenance
Lean maintenance was first distinguished as a unique program by observers of the Toyota Production System (TPS) in the early 1980s. The phrase Lean Manufacturing was never used by Toyota but was coined by James Womack in his ground-breaking 1990 book titled The Machine That Changed the World.
TPS concepts include: waste elimination (Lean Manufacturing), standardized work practices, just-in-time manufacturing scheduling, and a focus on quality. Shigeo Shingo is generally credited with originating lean manufacturing as part of TPS. He was a brilliant observer of manufacturing processes, and could see the waste in almost every process. Lean was named from that time, but the philosophy has been around for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Womack and Jones in their 2005 book Lean Solutions defined lean thinking. The two men were discussing manufacturing a product, but the conclusion completely applies to maintenance. It is said that the process should provide for something actually desired by the customer—in other words, a product that the customer wants or needs. In our business, the products are the services that repair breakdowns, efforts that provide reliability and uptime, and anything we do to assure consistent quality output.
In an interview, Geoff Green, an expert and facilitator of Lean manufacturing practices for SIRF Round Table in Australia, and Joanne Law, marketing head of the Lean Roundtable, described some of the history and attitudes important in Lean approaches. First Geoff explained that Lean came from automobile assembly plants where machines are small, operators are extremely well paid, and high-end (skill-intensive) maintenance may be outsourced anyway. This history explained why all the programs that evolved from TPS were operator-oriented and not maintenance-oriented (such as TPM).
Green and Law went on to explain that the tools they use for Lean are just tools and they are not ‘it’; the tools are not the program. What is ‘It’ is to have the employees engaged in their jobs, aware of the process around them, and concerned with waste. Employees can expose problems and have the power to resolve the problems. Lean maintenance would have the goal of having the maintenance workers be conscious of and concerned about waste.
One of the powerful exercises commonly used to show where waste exists in Lean manufacturing is to draw a circle on the floor from which the Lean team members can see the operation, and park them there for a few hours so that they can look at what is going on, ask themselves questions, and begin to see waste. This same technique can be applied by drawing the circle anywhere that maintenance people congregate (stores, tool crib, or the maintenance shop).
It is stressed that Lean is a tactical tool not a strategic tool. It is not designed for long-term change but rather toward immediate waste elimination. There is a tendency to push Lean toward a strategy for long term review of the maintenance process. There is a question to answer: What would my customer not be willing to pay for, if they knew about it?
In any program, or in any part of life, there are people who go too far and include everything under the banner of Lean (or in whatever else their passion is centered). Green and Law’s last comment in the interview was to beware of the lean fundamentalist.
What is it?
“Well what is lean?” you might ask. Lean is what people have always done. If you owned a factory you would practice Lean. In your household, don’t you try to run a lean operation? Aren’t you always telling the kids to turn the lights off, and to not use so much water?
Shingo’s definition of lean is an all-out war against waste from both manufacturing efficiencies and under-utilization of people. That is a pretty good starting point. Let’s get more specific.
Lean Maintenance: Is defined as delivery of maintenance services to customers with as little waste as possible, or producing a desirable maintenance outcome with the fewest inputs possible. In this discussion we will investigate ways of providing excellent services while minimizing the 10 inputs:
1.Labor (any kind including labor from the operator, mechanic, clerk, staff, and contractor)
2.Management effort (reduce headaches, or non-standard conditions requiring special management inputs)
3.Maintenance parts, materials, supplies
4.Contractors
5.Equipment