Lean Maintenance. Joel Levitt
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of lean maintenance. So, we have a little bit of a dilemma.
The solution to this dilemma is that as yet there are no truly maintenance-free factories. Until there are, we have to make maintenance lean. When there are maintenance-free designs, we will have to reconsider this position. So, on the way to having maintenance-free systems, you can take on the fat in maintenance.
Some of you may watch Star Trek (one of my favorite series that I think has captured many issues of maintenance management over time). I tell people that if you ever want to know something about maintenance, just watch Star Trek and see how maintenance issues are treated. Everything you need to know about maintenance has been in a Star Trek episode.
In the first Star Trek series, back in the late 60s, Scotty was the chief engineer and Scotty would fix things. Scotty would get down underneath this thing and he would wriggle around some complicated-looking tool and he would fix things. He’d actually get dirty.
And in the second series Star Trek, the Next Generation, Geordi La Forge was the chief engineer. In a hundred episodes or so, Geordi rarely fixed anything. He would have a problem (there was almost one in every episode); he’d walk over to a computer console and would reconfigure the warp couplings or something like that, by punching a bunch of weird-looking symbols.
And then in Voyager, it’s even better. Participants in the Voyager series didn’t even discuss breakdowns because the ship was biological and fixed itself. B’Elanna Troy was the chief engineer and her whole mission was getting more power. She spent her time getting more power out of the warp engine (the reason why is beyond the scope of this discussion).
And these items illustrate exactly what are the three recent generations of maintenance. The first generation, in the mid 1960s, was the super fix-it guy who could fix anything. He was an older person (compared to the rest of the crew) but up-to-date with all the technology. The second generation in the 1990s was the young, smart, computer guy. And in the third generation in the 2000s, the ship was biological, and could just grow new circuits.
Machines that can fix themselves are what your bosses dream about, by the way.
These are battles that have been fought for years
Many of us have been fighting these lean battles for years. In a recent training session on Planning in an ore processing facility, I was amazed that, without prompting about waste and the value stream of maintenance, or any preparation to set up the discussion, the maintenance workers and plant operators came up with a great collection of ideas about where the waste was located.
You can see that waste is foremost in the workers’ minds because unlike managers, the waste is in the workers’ faces. Logically, the list of ideas can be divided into a few areas. These few areas could be used to start the lean discussions within the plant. If you embark on a Lean journey, always ask yourself the question: where is the lowest-hanging fruit in each of the areas? Nothing beats having success on your first few projects.
Waste discussion from Alcoa, Point Comfort, Texas July 2007,
•The biggest waste is searching for and ordering parts. It seems wrong parts are constantly ordered or received. The whole process around parts is a huge waste of time.
•Getting refurbished components from outside vendors with incorrect specifications. And inadequate follow-up on outsourced rebuilding.
•Parts that are pulled for a job and not used are thrown away because it is too much trouble to return them.
•Long-lead-time parts are not set up on the system or stocked (the plant is 50 years old).
•Time wasted going to jobs unprepared. The maintenance people frequently don’t have the materials or tools, and then have to leave the jobs to collect the stuff.
•Planners do not have job knowledge or know the job requirements.
•Starting jobs before you have all the parts and equipment (this is a daily problem).
•Showing up on jobs and not being able to get access to equipment because it’s not locked out, cleaned, or ready for maintenance.
•Not having the right tools in the tool room and having to improvise.
•When you get tools from the crib, they frequently don’t work.
•Lifting gear (cranes, Broderson, etc) break down too often. Mobile equipment takes too long to get back from the garage.
•The biggest waste is sharing large equipment. When ever a mobile crane is needed it seems like someone else has it. It then becomes necessary to steal one from another unit.
•Craftspeople do not get ready to use the crane when they order it (because they know they will not get it right away anyway. When they do get it they might even hide it).
•The issue of cross training of the General Mechanics (GMs). There is a wide variation in skill sets among the GMs. Some can weld plate but not pipe, some can align pumps. These deficiencies cripple the crews, create inefficiency and put a lot of pressure on the GMs with more skills.
•A huge amount of time is wasted in re-inventing the wheel. We have a 50-year old plant, yet we have to invent ways of doing things that have been done successfully before.
•Only patching and not fixing the root cause of the problem due to cost, budget or production concerns wastes a lot of time.
•Poor PMs (not well-directed, personnel skills, often not equal to the task).
•Inflexible break and meal times.
•The Work Requested is incorrectly scoped or defined, leading to the wrong job being done.
•Lack of coherent priorities means workers are pulled off scheduled jobs to work on emergencies, which causes lost time and interferes with the timely completion of PMs (which in turn causes more emergencies). Jobs sometimes come up that are called emergencies but they are not really emergencies.
•Excessive emergencies interrupt scheduled work. Maintenance seldom seems to have a chance to finish what is started in one go.
•Too many managers and not enough workers to do the work. On a valve change, too many supervisors standing around trying to rush the job.
•Supervisors have no idea whether the job is ready.
•Problems with scaffolding. Only contracting for two crews to cover the entire plant so that maintenance frequently has to wait excessive amounts of time. Using a contractor is often a waste of money and causes more problems than it solves.
It might be apparent that some of these items describe waste that is easily accessible or “low hanging fruit” and some items require significant change. As the processes for Lean Maintenance projects are described, you can revisit this list and see even more project opportunities.
Lean Maintenance projects are fun!
The truth is Lean Maintenance is fun. These investigations and projects are going to be the fun stuff, and are the part of maintenance that, if any of you have ever come up through the maintenance ranks, are maintenance engineers, or have hands-on experience designing stuff; this may be the most fun part of what you do.
You’ll soon start to see some of the things we’re going to address. The exercises in this work can be done with the people in the crafts. This work has been done in a wide range of organizations with a very wide variety of participants.
In a school (described in detail in a later chapter), we worked with the groundskeepers, who didn’t understand English. I would give instructions and then one of them would translate it for everyone at the table. And the workers would do these projects, and you could feel the energy. So even though fun is against the grain in maintenance circles, we’re going to shoot for that as part of these projects.
Sometimes the negative result is positive
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