The Meaning and Value of Maintenance

10/10/2011

Would you like to improve the reliability in your plant? Have you ever made great strides forward in improvement and failed to sustain them? If so, don’t worry you are not the only one and the answer is right here.

The operation of the maintenance department is often not understood by Managers who are not Engineers themselves. In some cases engineering is seen as a necessary evil that spends too much money whilst not providing clarity on what value is delivered in return.

Through over a decade of experience building Maintenance Systems in World Class Companies we have developed our understanding of Maintenance and confirmed our belief in its value. All we need to do is show you how.

From studying Japanese approaches we know that they have a different concept of what Maintenance means. To the Japanese the concept of Maintenance is about sustaining performance and this ties in perfectly with the essence of De-Bottle Necking Method (DBM).

DBM broadly says sort out your speed, accumulation and speed restricting problems before worrying about your Availability. Impact workshops and the application of Rapid Lean tools can create a dramatic step change in performance in a very short space of time. After this the challenge becomes sustaining the new performance levels and this includes dealing with Availability.

The best approach for driving up Availability in manufacturing plants also stems from Japan and that is TPM (Total Productive Maintenance). The defining characteristic of TPM is the involvement of operators in the maintenance effort which gives them new levels of understanding and ownership of their equipment.

So does it work? We have worked with plants that have achieved levels of Availability of above 99.8% over the course of one year. Did they spend a huge amount on maintenance? No they weren’t spending any more than plants achieving 50% Availability and maintenance costs are normally seen to reduce during TPM implementation.

So if you would like to increase your plant’s Availability we offer Japanese trained expertise to help and together we will ensure the plant works when you need it to. Please contact us to find out more. An initial meeting costs nothing and could be the start of a future you can rely on.