The skinny on lean maintenance

Participants in Plant Services latest Focus Group say that getting lean requires an understanding of how predictive technologies fit into the crucial balance between reactive, preventive and predictive efforts

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By David Berger, contributing editor

PlantServices.com

To what extent is predictive technology being used to create a lean maintenance department? That question formed the basis of a discussion among readers who participated in the latest Plant Services focus group in April. David Berger, contributing editor and maintenance management expert, moderated the discussion, which centered on participant’s widely varied efforts at reducing costs.

What we discovered is what we expected: that many manufacturers are focused on reducing costs, both in production and maintenance areas. What we didn’t expect was that, although predictive technology is playing a larger role in creating a lean environment, it’s the balance between reactive, preventive and predictive efforts that defines a successful lean maintenance program.

Please scroll down for an introduction of our participants.  Here are some excerpts from that discussion:

What does lean thinking, lean manufacturing, lean management or lean maintenance denote to you?

Stan Gorka: Less cost.

Bill Bilbro: It seems to imply efficiency and best use of resources.

Joe Litza: It’s more of a preventive philosophy, using preventive maintenance to cut down on the cost of maintenance programs or time spent on maintenance.

John Trost: It’s basically doing more with less through cost cutting.

If we agree on the basic understanding of what “lean” means, have you investigated a formal maintenance program? Doing something to cut costs, get more for less?

Bill Capizzano: In our company, it’s not formally called lean, but that’s exactly what we do. We utilize computer maintenance management systems, procurement — and preventive-type methods to maximize our efficiencies and minimize our downtimes.

Gorka: We have a regular maintenance program called total commitment maintenance, a world-class maintenance program. There are a lot of different steps toward being lean. Are we there? I doubt it. But if someone opens up a way through constant cost monitoring, that’s part of it.

Ted Sorenson: We’ve done some case and time studies on maintenance issues, such as how to improve time and effort when we tear down a piece of equipment and get it back online in a timely fashion. Because we’re a growing company, we’ve got to study how we can work smarter.

Trost: We have a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) and we do some predictive maintenance, oil analysis, etc. We still have a lot of room to grow. It’s just been in the last year that we’ve studied returns on it.

Litza: We’re just starting to get a formalized program together, where before everything was pretty much decentralized, and each area took care of its own issues. We are trying to get into more predictive maintenance, and ISO 9000 forces us to keep better logs and written information on our maintenance.

Bilbro: We’re such a small company that our mechanics are so busy that we cannot spare them for that type of activity. So when we get a new piece of equipment, we want to work as closely with the manufacturer as possible, to set up preventive maintenance (PM) schedules and such.

Tom Webb: We don’t have a formal program, but our equipment wears down after 3,000 running hours. We have timers on all the machines and the lasers have to be switched off every so many hours. So when the lasers go down, the technicians go in, and we go back and try to squeeze in the maintenance, such as lubrication, greasing, and try to coordinate it all together.

What percentage of your work is preventive versus predictive, versus reactive maintenance?

Webb: Preventive, we’re always looking for something to make our jobs easier. We’re taking out all our DC drive machines, including shields and filters and all this other stuff, and putting in AC drives machines, which have no filters. They last 15 to 20 years. The DC drives last only ten years. We don’t let anything go to the point where it breaks. It’s $500 an hour just for that machine, not to mention the time for labor. If something breaks, we’ll try to have it repaired. We just sent out a circuit board for repair and the shop told me two days — it’s been seven. We try to keep one of everything on the shelf, too.

Gorka: We do all PMs on a regular basis. We do a lot, maybe 30 to 40% reactive maintenance and mostly preventative maintenance. But it took about eight years to get there. Ten years ago when we started the program, some 90% was reactive and ten percent preventive, so it’s gotten a lot better. But there are still some times when it’s hectic. It subsides a little bit and then gets better. We do a lot of the predictive maintenance, such as changing ball screws or changing drives, but it’s not really where it should be. We’re very busy. It’s very tough to schedule stuff with the production department.

Capizzano: We do a lot of predictive maintenance and we’ve had our CMMS systems for about seven years. It’s really given us incredible rewards. We perform scoping and vibration analysis on all of our blowers and pumps. We also do vibration analysis, oil analysis and thermography on all of our electrical cabinets and roofs. On our air compressors and certain towers, we tear them down and rebuild. We combined the operations and the maintenance and engineering into one work order involving our CMMS. We came out with work order assistants called MORE, which stands for “maintenance operations or request engineering.” Everything goes into the CMMS, is prioritized and basically managed by the maintenance department; but operations, maintenance, engineering all are coordinated out of the same system. We have two different types of what we call PM programs; some that the maintenance department is responsible for, some the operators are responsible for. Since we’ve been recording the last three years, we have reached levels of 90 to 92% preventive versus reactive, which is a complete turn-around for us, considering eight years ago we were probably ten percent preventive and 90% reactive. It’s become a totally self-directed workforce. We used to have a planner, a clerk, three supervisors and a manager. Now we have a manager, an engineer and that’s it. The tracks are totally self-directed, so we’ve cut our workforce down, yet increased the amount of work and reduced our downtime by 60 to 70%.