Lean Maintenance

A Practical, Step-By-Step Guide for Increasing Efficiency

Javier Girón Blanco, Torsten Dederichs

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351712729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The book is about applying Lean manufacturing principles to industrial maintenance in order to improve the efficiency and be able to do more with the same (or less) resources. By industrial maintenance we mean the maintenance that takes place in factories and industrial facilities. The book is the result of multiple improvement projects carried out by the authors in various industrial settings and sectors in the past 10 years.The approach works and can be applied in any industry. It yields results without investment. The book is a step-by-step guide that takes the reader through the maintenance process, from equipment failure to finished repair. In each step of the process, the typical inefficiencies are explained and tools are given to improve the process. The book is meant to be used as a guide in an improvement journey. The improvement approach presented in the book is very close to the shop floor and instructs the reader to engage with all team members in the maintenance department in every step of the process, in order to make the improvements sustainable.

If one looks at the main market indexes, between one third and one half of companies on those indexes belong to the industrial sector: automotive, power generation, basic materials, chemicals, consumer goods, et cetera. Those companies spend on average 2 – 5% of plant replacement value per year on maintenance. About one third of this cost is maintenance labor.

The maintenance work that gets done every day in factories around the world is typically inefficient, from a Lean perspective: time is wasted, different tasks are not properly coordinated, job durations are overestimated and job plans, when they exist, are thus "inflated" to cover up the inefficiency.

All this happens because maintenance tends to be the "forgotten" area of efficiency in industrial companies, as much of the improvements are carried out on the (literally) productive areas of the factories. When companies set out to "improve" maintenance, they typically do it through budget cuts that can risk the reliability of the equipment.

The authors believe there is a better way to do more with the same resources through a careful

review of the current way of working and the introduction of Lean.

With this book, the authors try to bring to maintenance managers and practitioners the tools they

need to quickly improve efficiency (in a matter of weeks) without any investment.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Maintenance Matters

Maintenance is a big business. The amount of money that industrial companies spend each year on maintaining their plants (chemical plants, energy plants, discrete manufacturing plants, etc.) ranges from 2% to more than 5% of the plant replacement value. About a third of that maintenance cost is labor. And labor cost is strongly driven by the way in which work is planned and carried out. If one looks at the maintenance work that gets done every day in factories around the world, one would notice that the execution is very often inefficient, from a Lean perspective: time is wasted, different tasks are not properly coordinated, job durations are overestimated, and job plans, when they exist, are thus “inflated” to cover up the inefficiency.

All this happens because maintenance tends to be the “forgotten” area of efficiency in industrial companies, as much of the improvements are carried out on the productive (i.e., producing) areas of the factories. Efficient planning and execution of maintenance work can be a source of competitive advantage for companies. Efficient work takes less effort to perform and has a higher quality, which is reflected in the reliability of the plant.

“Lean Maintenance”: What Is It?

Maintenance technicians are the “go-to guys” when machines break down. They are modern-day heroes who can fix anything, anytime. The role of the “hero” becomes evident when maintenance starts to work in a predominantly reactive mode, firefighting its way through the day. At this point, people start to view maintenance as a necessary evil, because it is basically a cost center that requires management attention and ties up capital (spare parts inventory) and personnel. This sentiment is exacerbated when maintenance is performed “at all costs”: work orders take more time, money, and effort to get done; budgets are exceeded; and there is an unhealthy relationship between ­maintenance and production. At this point, top management starts to consider ways to get costs under control: top-down cost reductions (meaning that less maintenance gets done, with the corresponding availability risk), partial or total outsourcing, and so forth. These measures can provide a quick fix but will not solve the firefighting or the broken relationship between maintenance and production. This can lead to frustration, as things go back to where they were before.

To break this vicious circle, we propose a different approach. In our view, maintenance can be a source of profitability by ensuring high availability. As mentioned before, companies with an efficient and effective maintenance function have a clear competitive advantage. A Lean maintenance function ensures that all resources are dedicated to value-adding activities, taking out the process “waste” and being able to do more with the current resources.

In order to achieve Lean maintenance, a number of elements must be in place: the interfaces between production and maintenance along the full maintenance process need to be smooth, and maintenance work needs to be properly selected, prioritized, planned, scheduled, and carried out. Everyone involved in the process should know how he or she can contribute to this goal.

Why This Book?

During the course of a multiyear, multiplant transformation program in the energy sector, we realized that the existing literature on Lean maintenance was either too focused on equipment maintenance strategy, too shallow, or too theoretical. We wanted to write a pragmatic, to-the-point, easy-to-follow book (more like a workbook) that guides the reader through a series of steps aimed at radically improving the maintenance execution process, that is, all the steps from failure detection to work order completion, covering the six individual steps of (1) maintenance notification, (2) selection and prioritization, (3) planning, (4) scheduling, (5) execution, and (6) performance review.

Who Is This Book For?

This book is for anyone who wants to improve maintenance in their organization. Maintenance managers, superintendents, shop supervisors, and consultants will find it useful.

The book is easy to read and follow. We selected a style of writing that makes the reader feel like it is a friend who is guiding him or her through the improvement process, using down-to-earth language and examples.

How Is the Book Structured?

As mentioned earlier, this book is actually a workbook to be used while improving the maintenance process. Throughout the book, there are areas where you “fill in the blanks” as you analyze and improve the process.

The chapter-by-chapter structure is as follows:

Chapter  2 starts with an introduction to Lean, the methodology and main concepts behind it. The concepts are perfectly illustrated in the example of John the Gardener.

Chapter  3 describes the ideal maintenance execution process. It shows the characteristics of a Lean maintenance process along each step. This chapter is meant to be used to set the aspiration for improvement.

Chapter  4 shows how to diagnose the existing maintenance process. It shows in detail the different data analyses and shop floor observations required to get a clear picture of where the problems are, and also to get an objective (i.e., fact-based) starting point or baseline for improvement.

Chapter  5 gives useful tips on how to involve people in the improvement process and how to communicate properly what the improvement process looks like. There will be initial resistance or fear to any change, so it is important to address this at the beginning. By the way, this is a topic we, the authors, have learned to fine-tune the hard way.

Chapter  6 starts off introducing what we call “process improvement workshops” and explaining how to conduct them successfully. The process improvement workshops are a series of meetings (one per process step) involving the people who carry out the work in each step. The goal of the meetings is to introduce tangible, pragmatic, and visible improvements in each process step.

Chapters  7 through 12 cover the six steps of the maintenance process: maintenance notification (Chapter  7), selection and prioritization (Chapter  8), planning (Chapter  9), scheduling (Chapter  10), execution (Chapter  11), and performance review (Chapter  12).

Chapter  13 covers the topic of sustainability, meaning making sure that the changes and improvements you introduce are long lasting. Warning : This involves hard work. There are no automatic or machine-driven solutions here. This involves being on top of things, measuring performance, and acting quickly in case of deviations.

Finally, Chapter  14 presents a selection of useful Lean tools. Plenty of information on lots of Lean tools is available on the Internet, so we decided to present only a small list of very useful Lean tools (six in total) that can be applied to improve the maintenance process. The chapter gives you a short explanation of the tools plus tips on when and how to use them.

In addition to this book, we have created the website www.make-lean-easy.today, where you will find supporting material, like predefined activity sampling and wrench time worksheets. The log-in details are:

Username: Lean_Maintenance

Password: Start_now!

We wish you good luck on your journey.

Chapter 2

Short Introduction to Lean Management

The Origin of Lean

The origin of Lean, also known as the “Toyota Production System” (TPS) or the “Toyota way,” can be traced back—unsurprisingly—to the Toyota company. At the core of the Lean philosophy is the elimination of any kind of waste in a process and the alignment of all actions to the customer’s needs.

Already in 1896, Sakichi Toyoda, founder of the Toyota Industries, invented an automatic power loom that could automatically detect a broken thread and stop itself before the defect was detected by the workers downstream and large numbers of scrap fabric originated. In this way, the customers who used the Toyoda looms could weave higher-quality fabrics than those who used looms from the competition. Later, Kiichiro Toyoda, Sakichi’s son and founder of the Toyota Motor Company, developed the first elements of the TPS based on his firm belief that ideal working conditions prevail in an environment where machines, equipment, and people work together like cogs in a clock.

The basic elements of the TPS had already been developed in the years before the Second World War. Japan, at the time, was isolated and raw materials were scarce. Eliminating waste was the order of the day. But even in the postwar years, the situation hardly i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Short Introduction to Lean Management
• 3 The Ideal Maintenance Process
• 4 How Is YOUR Process? Conducting a Process Diagnostic
• 5 A Couple of Thoughts before Starting the Improvement Effort
• 6 Improving Your Process: Step by Step
• 7 Step 1: “What Can I Do for You?” Improving Maintenance Notifications
• 8 Step 2: “To Fix or Not to Fix … and When”: Improving Maintenance Work Selection and Prioritization
• 9 Step 3: “Got Everything We Need?” Improving Work Order Planning
• 10 Step 4: “Like Clockwork” : Improving Work Order Scheduling
• 11 Step 5:  “The Real Thing ”: Improving Work Order Execution 
• 12 Step 6: “How Did It Go?”  Introducing Performance Indicators
• 13 How to Make Things Work Long Term/Making Change Stick
• 14 Selected Lean Tools for Maintenance
• Index