Lean Maintenance Can Release the Full Potential of Your Maintenance Function
A year ago, the Operations Director was concerned. The company was making great strides in improving productivity, quality and cost performance yet to the director’s eyes, the Lean revolution had by-passed the maintenance function.
It was clear that effective maintenance is fundamental to meeting that challenge of increasing customer expectations. The traditional “maintenance as a necessary evil” was not going to be good enough to meet the future customer service expectations.
Lean Maintenance provided the answer. It incorporates the principles of lean thinking, including a plan for every asset to assure flexibility and the systematic improvement of process capability. It helped the maintenance team to design maintenance standard work to reduce waste and non-value added activities.
Together with improved daily management and use of visual management, time was redirected towards focused improvement to systematically extend mean time between interventions and reduce quality defects. This proved to be particularly useful when introducing new products and equipment because the maintenance engineers had time to focus on designing out latent weaknesses before the new assets arrived.
There was still plenty to do but the maintenance improvement master plan at the core of the Lean Maintenance process has finally been aligned with the business strategy. In fact maintenance led lean projects are on track to deliver over 40% of the gains from the current lean programme.
To find out more about how Lean Maintenance can release the full potential of your maintenance function why not sign up to DAK’s CPD Certified Lean Maintenance workshop, 21-23 April 2015, in Warwickshire, UK. During the workshop participants will review current practices against lean maintenance standards and use the insight gained to create a maintenance improvement master plan to deliver the full value adding potential of maintenance within a Lean, TPM or Six Sigma improvement programme. Contact sue.catt@dakconsulting.co.uk or call +44 (0) 1491 845504 to book your place and for workshop brochure. Visit www.dakacdemy.com for full listing of DAK’s improvement workshops.
