Lean Maintenance. Joel Levitt
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They felt that a more-expensive edging blade would be Leaner (cheaper per foot of edging and less effort to use). So we bought the expensive cutting blade, but it turned out that their old cheap blade performed about the same as the expensive blade. To compound the problem the cheap one could be sharpened but the expensive one had special steel alloys and a shape that couldn’t be sharpened. So it was clearly Leaner and cheaper to use the cheaper blade.
The team felt really bad. They felt bad because their project had failed. I said that I considered it to be a completely successful project, because it gave us information about the process or product that we didn’t have before, and we now had a new basis for thinking about things. People were much more conscious of the whole blade issue after that than they were before. So, a good project might be successful even if it has a negative result. The next time a new blade comes out, they can give it a try and test it against their benchmark.
What does waste look like?
Is it non-added value? Actually, that’s what waste doesn’t look like. What does waste look like? This is not a high-level question; I’m asking a kindergarten question here. Waste looks like garbage, a spill on the floor, extra parts in the scrap bins, personnel standing around.
When you take on Lean you get sensitivity to what waste looks like. You can walk into your place and see waste when you couldn’t see it before. Once you start to think this way, you walk through the storeroom and when the dust is really thick on something you start to think of questions. Is the part there for a really good reason (I don’t want to minimize that in the maintenance world)?
It may be what we call an insurance-policy spare, which you expressly have on the shelf to not use. But there’s stuff in the stock room that you won’t use, which is different from “not use”.
In the stock room at a large coal-fired power plant they had this large part, it looked like the head of a cylinder. It was covered with a thick coat of grease and dust (so it had been there a while). I asked, “What is that?” The stock room manager answered “Well, I don’t really know what it is. And neither do any of my people. And, in fact, I invited the old maintenance guys in here that would have been around when this was used before, and they don’t know what it is either.” Now that will qualify to me as some kind of waste, although we don’t know what kind of waste because we don’t know what it is. And, of course, what everybody is afraid of is making a mistake and getting rid of it (and finding it is needed the next day).
An automated assembly operation had a $25,000 power supply for a robot that was never supposed to break. The company bought it because it had a six months lead time. We call that an insurance policy part. It’s a well-established strategy that there are certain things that are so onerous to not have, that you have them. These parts are not waste. The question is, what about everything else? What about the SKU (stock keeping unit—single part number) that is not an insurance policy spare. That’s what we want to attack.
Once we start to eliminate waste we start to see what waste looks like. Consider the US Mint. They blank out 11 coins at a time—quarters in this instance. The job is run on a 200-stroke per minute Shuler press. The blanks are cut from the clad metal coil like cookies being cut by a cookie cutter. The blanks (round disks before they are coins) pass through the press and fall on to a conveyer belt. The belt takes the blanks to the coining operation.
US Coins are blanked and coined in separate operations. Under the Shuler press there’s a big pile of blanks on the floor. Every blank on the floor cost the Mint $0.06–0.07.The manager said, “Well, what happens is, the blanks hit the conveyer belt and a few roll off.” We decided to modify the chute underneath the press to better control the blanks falling on to the conveyer belt. To test the idea we designed an extension to the chute with cardboard and duct tape. We cut up a cardboard box and wrapped it around the chute so that the space was just more than the thickness of the coin.
When the blanks came out on the conveyer belt, any that were standing up were knocked over by the edge of the new cardboard chute. The blanks no longer fell off the belt onto the floor. The number of blanks that fell off dropped to 1 or 2 a shift. The savings was in the thousands of dollars. The impact on maintenance was that the maintenance effort was divided up among more shippable units. An hour a day cleaning up the blanks was also saved.
You have to have an idea where to start to look for Fat. This book will spend several chapters on this issue of where to look. A certain kind of vision is needed that allows you to walk into your plant or any plant and get the tempo of the place.
Look around and see the cleanliness of a “5S” shop (to be discussed in its own chapter). If everything is really tidy you can immediately see problem areas. You can tell when a place is well organized or not well organized, when there’s debris under the tables or not. You can see that kind of waste. That is the obvious stuff. There is also wasted effort, time, wasted energy, wasted spares, etc. that you can’t easily see.
Not every organization should undertake an effort of this type.
This is a tough conversation. If a company is driven by short-term goals exclusively, then Lean Maintenance programs might not be appropriate. It is almost as if the profit-making corporation is designed to be intrinsically against good long-term maintenance practices.
We are not talking about greed here. But we are talking about having a game called business, where one of the rules is to look at the profit numbers for each short interval. If we look only at short term economics, the Future Value (FV) of the maintenance effort discounted to today, never seems to equal the Present Value (PV) of the investment.
This is a pure devil’s advocate position. But keep in mind that this view is held by many smart people. In a later chapter we will discuss the leaks in the pipeline in Alaska. As an example, place the savings over 30 years by not doing all the maintenance necessary to avoid the leaks on one side of the equation. On the other side, place the costs to fix the leaks 30 years later. If you do the math, small amounts of money saved over 30 years (this is a mortgage payment type of problem) can justify huge spending on leaks now. Of course these money calculations ignore the impact on the environment, but that impact is not built into the structure of the typical corporation. We have to fight that position with all the tools available. But if the company is dedicated to only short term gains, we may lose the argument.
Given all the kudos given to Lean maintenance it might be a surprise to know it is not always a good idea. Lean Maintenance can be a demotivator unless there are several things that are committed to and present. Some of the attitudes needed for success are:
1.Commitment that efficiencies gained will not result in layoffs.
2.Commitment to follow through on at least 50% or more of the projects if the engineering and economics work (the more projects you follow through on the better). The president of Sony, in its heyday, spent a good deal of effort following through on ideas from employees, even those of marginal value. He said that every project done was a motivator to the entire workforce and was well worth it, even if it in itself didn’t make money.
3.Ability to commit the resources to the effort, including time off from regular duties to work on projects, small amounts of money to purchase experimental materials, and management/staff coaching time.
4.Ability to allow flexibility in purchasing non-standard items from new vendors on a rush basis.
5.Ability to allow people to cross functional and trade lines, and to encourage workers to talk directly to the appropriate experts in the accounting, purchasing, legal, and engineering departments.
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CHAPTER 1 |
Distinguishing Lean from Everything Else