FrenchSTOP PRESS: Improved reliability leads to reduced costs and improved profit
- Posted on November 9, 2015
- By EMS Cognito
- in Uncategorized
- Comments: Comments Off on STOP PRESS: Improved reliability leads to reduced costs and improved profit
- Comments Off on STOP PRESS: Improved reliability leads to reduced costs and improved profit
Lean reliability centred maintenance does make a difference. It reduces variation leading to stable processes that can be improved.
Put plainly. Maintenance in the traditional sense is at best reactive, machine breaks down it gets fixed. Preventative actions are generated from the equipment manufacturer and do not consider how you use the equipment. These then lead to lots of process variation; the availability of plant is unpredictable and you go home each day feeling like it’s been a hard week only to repeat the process the following Monday.
It does not have to be this way. You can break through the brick wall!
Lean RCM is different it develops a plan around critical plant. The role of maintenance is to support operations but the two departments need to work together, operations need to set the standard. What do you need the plant to achieve? Any drift from this standard needs attention from maintenance so it does not cause a breakdown.
Using the 7 questions of RCM we then analyse the critical plant with 3 objectives in mind;
- How can we make it easy to do right and difficult to do wrong – the right grease goes to the right place at the right time, every time
- Can we make it easy to spot when things are going wrong – visual process
- Eliminate the need for good people to operate average systems – develop a simple system for all to follow
Then we implement the improvements. At this point we remove a lot of old preventative tasks that add no value to keeping the machine running and create tasks for operators to be the eyes and ears of maintenance. We introduce a simple system to tag the machine when it is not at standard, before it leads to a breakdown.
Lean RCM is simple to describe and implement the hard part is change management, you have to change the way you think of maintenance as a function in the plant. The success is astonishing.
Lean RCM it works but you need to dedicate time to change the way you think.
How will you make an IMPACT?
