What is Lean Maintenance?
Far from being a necessary evil, experience shows that the proactive involvement of Maintenance within a Lean Manufacturing programme accelerates the delivery of an organisation’s Lean capability.
The key to releasing the full value adding potential of Lean Manufacturing is to transform the shop floor role of maintenance engineering. Traditionally even best practice maintenance has concentrated on managing the consequences of failure.
In a Lean Maintenance environment the role becomes one of enhancing the value adding capabilities of operations. The transformation at the heart of Lean Maintenance is a 2 stage process.
Stage 1 is stabilisation. This involves enhancing the planned preventive maintenance process to systematically achieve the goal of zero breakdowns. The common causes of breakdowns can be traced to 2 factors, equipment condition and human error.
As technology is brought under control under stage 2, the focus for maintenance shifts from reducing downtime to reducing quality defects to compensate for the Lean approach of producing in smaller batch sizes with frequent change overs.
This means raising maintenance standards and extending this to include care of production tooling increasing the precision of inspection routines to reduce variation from optimum performance.
The gains are significant. In summary Lean maintenance:
* More than doubles the value to the organisation of traditional maintenance improvement programmes;
* Transforms the role of maintenance from fixing breakdowns to quality improvement;
* Raises maintenance standards to first stabilise and then optimise technology performance
* Releases maintainer time from routine activities to focus on long term solutions to technology problems;
* Puts the maintenance function at the heart of Lean Manufacturing improvement process.
Why not sign up for our “CPD Accredited” Lean Maintenance Strategy workshop which is being held 28-30 October 2014 in Hook, Hampshire. Call + 44 (01491) 845504 or contact sue.catt@dakconsulting.co.uk or visit www.dakacademy.com.
