The quest for lean equipment reliability

Lean is about doing more with less and the result of this is often seen as lower inventory levels, faster throughput times and more organised workplaces. However, the vast majority of organisations implementing lean pay little interest to one of the most basic and yet most over looked elements of lean – equipment reliability.

It is impossible to have a lean operation without having high performing and reliable equipment and yet that is exactly what many organisations attempt to do.

In order to avoid falling into this trap the following should help:

•  Measure plant performance honestly and openly using a measure such as OEE (overall equipment effectiveness), ensure that all time is accounted for and do not allow teams to hide issues

•  Monitor performance by the hour, by the day and by week, react and DO something when you are not hitting target

•  Have a robust loss management process to identify where time is being lost through breakdowns, through changeovers and minor stoppages. Feed this information into your improvement programme and reduce the time you are losing.

•  Make sure you have an effective maintenance plan, based around risk to the business, and make sure you execute it

•  Support this by having the right spares available so time isn’t lost waiting for parts to arrive

•  When things do breakdown, analyse improve and develop long term countermeasures. Toyota has the concept of the 100 year fix. It makes sure you do not get repeat occurrences of issues

•  Repair the things that you know are not working correctly or not quite in the condition they should be

•  Ensure operators are operating the equipment in a consistent and correct way. 50% of the reliability of a piece of equipment is derived from the way it is operated

•  Introduce an operator asset care programme. Have competent operators carry out basic maintenance and set up and adjust activities. 

•  Allocate craftsmen to specific pieces of equipment and make them responsible for improving the maintenance and performance of their equipment.