Q: Our production OEE [overall equipment effectiveness] is over 80 percent, but my preventative maintenance costs are way too high. How can I cut costs without decreasing my efficiencies?
A: The first step is to get agreement from the leader of the operations team that the preventative costs are indeed too high. Once there is buy-in to address this issue there are several potential issues you can consider.
Analyze the frequencies of your replace routines and compare them to the failures that have occurred. If no failures have occurred, it is likely the frequency is too short. This is normally overlooked on the basis of “if it ain't broke, don't fix it,” but if your costs are too high, it's broke!