Whirlpool Corporation runs in familiar circles.

Mechanically, the inner workings of this company’s dishwashers and washing machines twirl around water and detergent to clean up your cooking and clothing messes.

Financially, it’s a $13 billion-a-year firm that for decades has held a prestigious spot on the Fortune 500 list (No. 79 in the 2005 rankings).

Societally, it’s one of the world’s most recognizable brands.

And socially, it holds upper-hand status on its well-known consumer appliance cronies – General Electric, Maytag and Frigidaire.

Familiarity is one of Whirlpool’s biggest assets, but it’s also a major challenge.

“The marketplace is changing and it’s being led by companies that we do not know nearly as much about,” says Larry Dunfee, the manager of Consumer-Centered Manufacturing at Whirlpool’s site in Findlay, Ohio, the largest dishwasher manufacturing plant in the world.

That’s not spin. If you haven’t heard of companies such as Shian Jing, Wenling Changtian and Naiko Asia – kitchen appliance manufacturers from China and Taiwan – you will soon.

“We are used to competing against North American manufacturers in dishwashers. We know them and they know us,” Dunfee says. “We are all in the high-labor-cost North American market. We can all make improvements, but nobody has a strong leg up on anybody else. But now, we’re starting to see other companies coming from low-wage countries. They are starting to market their products in North America at a competitive price point. We see the possibilities of them using the leverage they have from a labor cost standpoint. That will put us in a difficult position to compete unless we do things differently.”

Whirlpool’s response is revolution. While still entrenched as the No. 1 player in the sector, the company has churned the waters and sought ways to:

• maximize its mechanical assets; and,

• maximize the contributions of its workforce.

Revolution has resulted in increased uptime, productivity and quality. This postively impacts revenue, profitability and share price.

The Pieces Fit Together

The 2,000 employees at Whirlpool’s 1 million-square-foot facility in Findlay, Ohio, are no stranger to the concepts of machine reliability and empowerment.

Maintenance management, in conjunction with production and operations leaders, introduced Total Productive Manufacturing (TPM) and Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) to the plant in the mid- and late-1990s. And early on, plant-floor employees played key roles in implementing improvement projects.

The difference, comparing 2005 with 1995, is cohesiveness. Whirlpool improvement tools now fit together instead of, in some cases, running parallel to one another. And, maintenance and production workers more uniformally buy into the vision that “we are all responsible for the equipment.”

TPM + RCM = Results

TPM (also known as Total Productive Maintenance) is a team-based approach to maintaining the condition of equipment. Its key components are operator ownership of equipment, continuous identification and implementation of improvements, and the development of planned maintenance.

Whirlpool places approximately 10 area operators and maintenance personnel across the various shifts on a TPM team. In TPM’s formative years at Whirlpool, a team was led by a process engineer or area supervisor. After receiving instruction on the principles of TPM and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE is a metric that tracks sources of operating loss, including equipment availability, performance and quality), each team began to identify opportunities in its functional area. The team then sought and implemented solutions to eliminate identified sources of loss.

Today, hourly workers share leadership roles on each of the plant’s 32 teams. In another departure from the past, RCM has become an important part of the TPM curriculum. All teams now get early exposure to an RCM analysis.

Electrical engineer Tom Jones (right)
works closely with production workers.

RCM links a structured thought process to the knowledge of a cross-functional team. Over a three- to five-day period, the goal is to develop a complete maintenance strategy for a process or piece of equipment.

During a recent RCM event, for example, senior reliability engineer Richard Word served as the facilitator of a 12-member cross-functional group that included two operators, two electricians, one operations supervisor, one operations engineer, one plastic molding technician, one quality process analyst, one millwright, one maintenance engineer, one maintenance supervisor and one supplier representative.

This group painstakingly analyzed the components of a vertical plastic press (hydraulic heat exchanger, flow control valve, light curtain, etc.), pinpointed all of the failure modes and effects, and implemented a maintenance strategy for each component to make the overall press more robust.

Senior reliability engineer Richard Word (seated in middle)
is flanked by the members of his recent RCM team.

All total, they followed a 14-step analytical process:

1. Review the equipment’s operational history.
2. Detail the parameters for probability of failure.
3. Detail the parameters for consequence of failure.
4. List the main functions.
5. List the sub-functions.
6. List the failure modes.
7. List the failure effects.
8. List the downtime.
9. List the consequence.
10. Navigate a decision tree.
11. Determine the proper maintenance task.
12. Determine the need for stocking a spare part.
13. Review the completeness of the analysis for the time scheduled.
14. Do a reality check.

“RCM is a good kickoff to the TPM team,” says maintenance and tooling manager John Siefker. “They really review the process and the equipment. It is a learning exercise of how it actually works. When you have an operator alongside a maintenance technician and an engineer, they start talking together about different components and what they do. Everyone provides their real-world perspective. Suddenly, light bulbs go on. This gives everyone a better understanding of the total process and what the end result is.”

To date, more than 20 percent of workers at the Findlay plant have participated in an RCM event.

Up until a few years ago, RCM analyses functioned mostly independent from other improvement projects. In large part, they now exist to provide perspective and work tasks for TPM teams.

Most of the RCM implementation involves reviewing and transferring a detailed maintenance task into the preventive maintenance (PM) system. PM tasks, which used to be highly generic in nature, now are information-heavy. Each task includes equipment status (running, anytime or down), an action verb (check, measure, inspect), the specific component (main motor), the specific condition (quantifiable whenever possible) and a reference to a condition-monitoring standard (if available or required).

Responsibility for tackling these PM tasks is generally split 50/50 between operators and maintenance technicians.

“TPM and RCM are not separate entities anymore,” says Word. “They always complemented one another, but we have gotten to the point where they come together and cross paths.”

Plant leaders, including facilities engineering
manager Randy Statzer (left), Consumer-Centered
Manufacturing manager Larry Dunfee and TPM
facilitator Jim Dray, help oversee the progress
of the reliability initiatives.

‘We Are All Responsible’

Shifting many of the maintenance functions to operators has allowed operators to take more “ownership” of the equipment.

“Operators originally thought their job was making components or assembling dishwashers,” says TPM facilitator Jim Dray. “That’s changed. We stress that you are responsible for the health and productivity of the equipment. It’s your job. It’s everyone’s job at this plant.”

Ownership means operators perform PM tasks such as cleaning and lubricating the machinery, changing belts and hoses, and monitoring heat strips and gauge tape. It also means that they handle many predictive maintenance tasks.

“We’ve given out some handheld infrared guns. We also have ultrasound equipment that our equipment setup operators can use,” says Dray.

All this allows maintenance technicians to focus more on activities that actually prevent mechanical failures.

“Prevention is at the top of our list now,” says electrical engineer Tom Jones. “It’s better to prevent failure than predict it.”

As an example, representatives from maintenance and engineering work with equipment suppliers and supply them with ideas, feedback and the performance history of similar equipment currently in use. The end result is equipment that is more robust and more reliable before it even is installed on the plant floor at Whirlpool.

That sharing relationship continues after the installation. For example, a representative from Battenfeld, a manufacturer of injection molding machines, served on the recent RCM project.

“We’re still exploring ways to reach out and involve our supply base,” says Dunfee. “This is an area of opportunity.”

By focusing on prevention as opposed to settling for detection, Word says the plant has been able to surpass the 90 percent mark in uptime. Also, unplanned maintenance activities accounted for just 13.4 percent of documented work orders during a recent 30-day period.

Stepping Up to The Plate

Failure prevention and unified equipment ownership are also evident in the plant’s push to develop the problem-solving skills of its workers. This is further proof of the integrated nature of Whirlpool’s improvement tools.

TPM team members, the same ones who go through an RCM analysis, receive training on additional “lean manufacturing” concepts such as Continuous Improvement. The CI process attacks areas of opportunity with a formal seven-step problem-solving methodology.

The steps include:

1. State the initial (general, non-specific) problem.

2. Clarify the problem. (What’s the specific defect? What is standard vs. actual? What is the target for the specific problem?)

3. Pinpoint current processes that contribute to the problem. (What specific action or actions caused the non-standard condition?)

4. Identify the root cause of the problem. (The real cause is often hidden behind more obvious symptoms.)

5. Suggest countermeasures to ensure the problem doesn’t happen again. (These are ideas to attack the root cause.)

6. Create plans to implement the countermeasures. (Get the formal battle plan in order to attack the root cause.)

7. Implement countermeasures and perform a follow-up. (Were the countermeasures effective? If yes, continue to monitor and ensure the solution sticks. If no, backtrack and develop new countermeasures.)

“This is a disciplined approach to problem-solving as opposed to shooting from the hip,” says Jones, explaining that traditional methods may or may not address the root cause or may focus on the “trivial many” issues as opposed to the “meaningful few.”

In a recent TPM Steering Committee meeting, teams presented case studies on how they solved problems related to non-fitting console seals, inconsistent performance on screwdriving assembly guns and impaired visibility of cycle indicator lights.

These problem-solving exercises are required for TPM teams to obtain and retain a Whirlpool certification status (see sidebar for certification guidelines).

On top of CI, the plant also incorporates lean thinking in a practice called “gemba” walks. (Gemba is a Japanese term that roughly translates to “the place where value is added.”) Here, maintenance and production leaders, hourly workers and even division vice president John Haywood stroll through a particular area of the facility and identify areas of waste, non-value activities, and ergonomic or safety issues.

Waste elimination is a major push. As one sign in the plant states: “If it doesn’t add value, it’s waste! What are you doing to reduce waste? Are you, as a customer, willing to pay for overproduction, inventory, long changeovers, searching for tools/parts, unplanned downtime, rework/scrap, unnecessary long distances or keeping ideas to yourself?”

One of the metrics used by the plant to record levels of waste is critical process yield. CPY accounts for many sources of loss. It starts with a baseline of maximum theoretical production rate and then all the sources of loss are calculated and deducted to give the percent of theoretical maximum capacity. At a high level, the sources of loss include availability, performance and quality. As the CPY figure increases, so does productivity.

Prior to the maturation and cohesion of Whirlpool’s improvement tools, assets at the Findlay plant produced at 60 to 70 percent of their capability. Benchmarks indicated that 85 to 90 percent was possible. In recent years, the plant CPY average rose to 79 percent in 2003, 84 percent in 2004 and 85 percent for the first three months of 2005.

“If we are making the right decisions and doing the right maintenance, it all comes together and we have some assurances,” says Jones. “All of this puts less stress on me and everyone else.”

Revolution’s Evolution

This Findlay, Ohio, plant is a shining example of what can happen when energized people and powerful tools come together to drive improvement.

Whirlpool has seen the benefits. It knows that this model allows it to better address present and future challenges and challengers. Therefore, it’s working to spread the news. Word is visiting sister sites in North America this year to teach strategies for RCM implementation. Dray did the same for TPM in years prior.

Back in Findlay, though, nobody is resting on laurels.

“When your ultimate goal is continuous improvement, you never get there,” says Dray. “It’s a never-ending process. That’s difficult for some people. They say, ‘Give me a goal. I’ll achieve it. I’m done. What’s next?’ With this, there is no end.”

It just goes round and round ... like a circle.

"Maintenance Reduction 50 Percent" is a lofty goal, but who is going to bet against this automaker?

The Georgetown, Ky., plant makes the Camry four-door
sedan, Avalon sedan, and the Solara coupe and convertible.

How are your company’s numbers? For comparison sake, here are some of Toyota’s:

3 - its rank on the list of the world’s most respected companies, based on the results from a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers and Financial Times poll.

5 - its rank on the list of the world’s most admired companies (No. 1 among automobile manufacturers), as selected by 10,000 executives in a survey by Fortune magazine.

6 - its rank in Harris Interactive’s study on the world’s best brands.

10 - its rank in Harris’ corporate reputation survey (again, first among car makers).

10 - its percentage of corporate growth in 2005.

13 - its percentage share of the global auto market in 2005.

13.3 - its percentage share of the United States market last year.

9.06 million - its planned production for 2006, which would surpass General Motors as tops in the industry.

But if you think those numbers are impressive or deserving of attention, consider this one: 50, as in 50 percent.

Maintenance Reduction 50 Percent, or MR-50, is the latest in a long line of Toyota initiatives aimed at eliminating waste and inefficiency in its automobile plants.

At most companies, those four words – Maintenance Reduction 50 Percent – would incite panic. However, to understand MR-50, and what it is and isn’t, you must know all the details, and you must know Toyota.

Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky (TMMK)
employs approximately 7,000 workers.

Great Expectations
High expectations are a key part of the Toyota corporate culture.

Teruyuki Minoura, the president and CEO of Toyota Motor Manufacturing North America (TMMNA) from 1998 to 2002, once stated, “It’s a basic characteristic of human beings that they develop wisdom from being put under pressure.”

More recently, Atsushi Niimi (TMMNA president/CEO from 2002 to 2005) pressed for high returns when he rolled out Global Body Line, an initiative aimed at increasing production line flexibility. During a keynote address at the 2004 National Manufacturing Week trade show, Niimi proudly reported a 50 percent savings in the cost to put in a new body line and 50 percent space savings.

With that as the backdrop, it’s not surprising that maintenance and reliability leaders at Toyota’s plant in Georgetown, Ky. – the company’s largest site in North America in terms of size, employment and output – were unfazed when the company requested that its well-established plants pursue a 50 percent maintenance reduction over the next few years.

Toyota maintenance leaders Ed Welch (left), David
Absher and Bruce Bremer.

“MR-50 is just an acronym,” says Ed Welch, the maintenance manager at the plant, known as Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky (TMMK). “It’s a challenge and a matter of emphasis.” The emphasis is pure Toyota.

First, it is Maintenance Reduction 50 Percent, not Cost Reduction 50 Percent or Employee Reduction 50 Percent.

“The goal is to reduce maintenance activities and the maintenance that you perform on a machine by 50 percent. That goal covers every machine and every activity,” says TMMK facilities control manager David Absher.

This is not about arbitrarily chopping budgets or personnel. It’s a game plan that balances today’s corporate wants and needs with long-term implications and vision.

Bruce Bremer, the facility engineering manager stationed at Toyota’s North American manufacturing headquarters in nearby Erlanger, Ky., aligns it with the basic principles of the Toyota Production System.

“MR seeks out anything in the organization that is waste or sets you up for waste,” he says. Welch gets specific and straightforward.

“Where’s the muda (a Japanese term for waste)? Is it overtime? Reduce it. Is it your indirect material costs? Find out why your costs are higher than the benchmark and find ways to reduce them,” he says. “Spare parts, downtime, planning and scheduling – identify the waste, then go after it.”

But is a 50 percent reduction in maintenance realistic, let alone possible? Consider your own activities and determine if half of them are unnecessary.

Toyota has a long history of initiatives
aimed at identifying waste and
inefficiency. If a process or an activity
(in maintenance, production, etc.) does
not add value, it is targeted for elimination.

“It may be an impossible dream, but you don’t know unless you try,” says Absher. “Our mind-set is to be aggressive. We don’t go into anything with the attitude that this is the best we can or could do. If you don’t have aggressive goals, how do you determine success? Did you get the maximum out of the initiative? Who knows? We set really high targets and then try like crazy to get there. If we don’t reach a target, we try to figure out why we fell short. What stopped us? Is there anything we can do to take it another step?”

While it’s apparent what the M in MR-50 stands for, these leaders explain that this is not a “maintenance initiative.”

“Everyone is involved with it,” says Absher. “Our people hate waste – waste of motion, all of the seven deadly muda (see sidebar on page 10). It’s like we have 7,000 industrial engineers working here. They see waste, and they know how to fix it.”  

Shunning the S
Before this article continues, you need to understand that these concepts and the ones that follow are not for the weak-willed. More importantly, you must understand that these concepts are applicable to you and your plant, not just Toyota.

“I am surprised by folks’ perceptions of us,” says Welch, explaining that outsiders hold the company and its people up as manufacturing Supermen. “We’re the same humans that are down the street. I don’t think we’re that different than most American manufacturing facilities. We have the same bureaucracy, the same frustrations that most companies do.”

Absher also shuns an elite label for his plant’s 710-person maintenance crew.

“I don’t know if I am in a position to offer any advice because, frankly, there are many companies out there that are really, really good at maintenance. They are a lot better than we are,” he says.

Maintenance Reduction 50 Percent is not a “maintenance” initiative .
It involves all plant employees.

Absher and Bremer cite Eli Lilly, National Starch, Alcoa and Harley-Davidson as maintenance role models for a variety of reasons. For example, they tout Alcoa for its long-range planning capabilities.

What makes Toyota different than other companies is culture and how the maintenance department applies an assortment of tools from the Toyota Production System.

Kaizen Culture
Most companies’ plants, perhaps even yours, thrive and function on the principle of history. “Our original manager in this area put that process in place.” “We won a best plant award in our state in 1991.” “We’ve always done it that way.”

Toyota discourages such rear-view thinking.

Taiichi Ohno, the company’s former executive vice president and the man credited with developing the Toyota Production System, once said: “Something is wrong if workers do not look around each day, find things that are tedious or boring, and then rewrite the procedures. Even last month’s manual should be out of date.”

Employees are encouraged, even expected, to shake things up and seek a better way. This system of all-hands continuous improvement is called kaizen. It is applicable for anything from bottlenecks to neck soreness to soaring energy costs and everything in between. Kaizen activities seek to identify and eliminate waste, while also striving to ensure quality and safety.

Toyota is a cutting-edge,
high-tech leader. That will
continue with the adoption
of predictive technologies
such as intelligent
maintenance systems (IMS).

“We don’t accept the situation,” says Absher. “We have the kaizen mind and we work toward continuous improvement. Everyone does. My job is equal to work plus kaizen. It’s not just the work. It’s thinking about improving what’s going on.”

There are no sacred cows. Employees are encouraged to “not be afraid” and to “challenge the norm.” Problem-solving skills are honed to handle these tasks.

Stopping Short
The kaizen mind-set is most visible in formal kaizen events. These projects bring together a cross-functional team of individuals for a week to three weeks to find solutions to a high-priority problem.

This is a tool utilized in many American plants, perhaps even yours. At TMMK in Georgetown, maintenance personnel play key roles on production-led kaizens.

“That is the perfect situation, a great way to work together, and I encourage that,” says Welch. “Maintenance members have their finger on the pulse of plant manufacturing issues. Their skills are put to good use.”

For instance, production workers sought to address an ergonomic issue on the Solara line. During the assembly process for this two-door coupe, operators who work under the car in a pit had to manually open and close each of the heavy doors 150 times a day. The process was physically taxing.

Maintenance team members designed, fabricated, programmed and implemented a very basic device that used a pneumatic cylinder to close the door when the operator hit the complete button.

For maintenance crews at most U.S. plants, this is where the kaizen process stops. Very few incorporate kaizen and other Toyota Production System (you may call it lean manufacturing) tools internally to address their own wastes and inefficiencies. They also fail to use them to troubleshoot problems or to create strategies for optimal machine reliability.

That P (production) in TPS (or the “manufacturing” in lean manufacturing) is often hard to look past. Even Toyota’s maintenance organization had its difficulties.

“Like many organizations, we struggled in trying to take the TPS message from production into maintenance,” says Welch. “We got stuck, and we still get stuck at times, trying to turn ‘production-based tools’ into maintenance tools.”

But the utilization of TPS components and other optimization strategies is what these leaders feel will make the difference in MR-50 and the drive to reduce maintenance activities by 50 percent.

What follows is an explanation of the traditional and non-traditional tools that the maintenance organization at TMMK and other Toyota plants has at its disposal.

The MR Toolbox
Maintenance-focused kaizen: Production has problems that can be solved by creative team thinking, but maintenance does, too. The key is to use the available time and energy on kaizen events that address meaningful issues.

“We use data for all of our analyses,” says Bremer. “We have key performance indicators that look at downtime, energy usage, reliability, costs and much more. That information will tell you where you need to focus your time.”

For example, Welch and Absher recently assembled groups for events related to spare parts reduction and duplication, servo driver axis wear in robots, planning and scheduling, electrical fault response, and identifying a stronger global CMMS solution.

“Spare parts has traditionally been a tough nut to crack,” says Welch. “If we can commonize equipment designs, we can get to the point where the design that one person builds uses the same cylinder as the design that I build.”

Absher lauds the maintenance reduction result from the fault response event in facilities control.

“We found that, on average, we experienced a fault on the bus duct in the plant every nine months that typically took 2.7 hours to repair and affected production in the area where the fault occurred,” he says. “We did a tremendous amount of problem solving, and when we were convinced we had done everything we could to prevent the faults, we determined we would do everything we could to minimize the impact.

In 2005, the Georgetown plant
produced 498,908 engines.

“We developed procedures for an electrical bus duct fault response and practiced them with every team until we got the procedure and the teams to a point where they could correct the fault condition and have a bus back on line in 0.9 hours. This was a 66 percent reduction.

“We then developed an electrical system breakdown cart. The cart has everything in it that we determined, through our examination and through dry runs, was necessary to correct and restore the condition. It also has everything necessary to change fuses on the bus and to troubleshoot and operate a distribution system breaker.”

While kaizen events are finite in length, consortiums allow for continual examination of specific issues as well as standards development. Water quality, electrical equipment, welding and energy are some of the active consortiums.

Technology: Toyota is exploring the application and feasibility of intelligent maintenance systems. IMS predict and forecast equipment performance so that “near-zero breakdown” status is achievable.

Data comes from two sources: sensors (mounted on the machine to gather information) and the entire enterprise system (including quality data, past history and trending). By correlating data from these sources (current and historical), it’s possible to predict future performance.

Toyota has been a financial contributor to the Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems program at the University of Cincinnati and the University of Michigan. As a result, TMMK serves as a testbed site for this groundbreaking technology. Activities currently center on air compressor efficiency, robot health and bearing monitoring.

“That’s a nice marriage of academia and manufacturing,” says Welch. “Some of the problems that we’re working on now aren’t our top-10 problems because academia does not move at that rate. They are researching much deeper.”

He says the alliance is still in its infancy, and that practicality and cost-effectiveness will dictate expansion and overall incorporation of next-generation IMS technology.

“Predictive maintenance will be wonderful, and that is something in the future,” he says. “But even if we found a predictive tool, could it be cost-effective? Two-thousand robots, seven joints each: That’s 14,000 sensors that we would need to put on if we’re going to look at those robot joints. So, how far do you go?”

Five-whys: This simple problem-solving technique helps users get to the root of a problem quickly. The strategy involves looking at any problem and continually asking “Why?” and “What caused this problem?” The answer to the first “why” will often prompt another “why.” The answer to the second “why” will prompt another, and so on.

“You’ll find the root cause, and if you can get rid of that, it will never happen again,” Ohno is quoted as saying.

An equally relevant Minoura quote goes, “If you incorporate all the accumulated knowledge of root causes that you’ve got from always asking ‘Why? Why? Why?’ into your equipment, you’re going to have something that no one else can come close to.”

Five-whys, root cause analysis and Reliability-Centered Maintenance are all used by TMMK to determine the appropriate level and method of maintenance for a given plant asset. They also allow the organization to direct limited resources to where they will have the greatest effect. For instance, facilities decided to let roof exhaust fans run to failure rather than regreasing the bearings and replacing the belts. Resources were redirected to chiller maintenance, an endeavor with bigger total cost implications.

Heijunka: Toyota defines this as the overall leveling, in the production schedule, of the volume and variety of items produced in given time periods. However, heijunka is easily applied to maintenance.

Focus on leveling. Maintenance workloads are famous for their peaks and valleys. Through proper planning and scheduling, workloads can be leveled, reducing overtime as well as inactivity. The creation of standardized work and the breakdown of large projects into smaller ones are good ways to reduce time blocks and to level the peaks.

“Rather than planning a huge PM once every six months, break it into very small increments that you can standardize and do on a daily or weekly basis,” says Absher. “When you do that, you can truly achieve heijunka.”

Bremer applies leveling to maintenance skill standards.

Inside the kaizen culture, workers
identify trouble spots, figure out their
root cause and then develop a solution.

“Standards are the base. They explain how something should be done,” he says. “Standards help a new maintenance hire quickly bring his or her skill level up to the level of competence of more experienced technicians. The goal is to achieve a consistently high level of competence for all technicians in your organization.”

Benchmarking: As you may have noticed, humility and continuous improvement are components of the Toyota culture. To that end, maintenance personnel at TMMK and other Toyota plants are constantly on the lookout for best practices.

“We aren’t anywhere near excellent, but we are on that journey. We learn quite a bit by benchmarking other facilities,” says Welch. “We are currently benchmarking our (Tier 1 and 2) suppliers whose reliability efforts are, frankly, stronger than ours.”

They benchmark auto plants and non-auto plants. They attend industry events to hear case studies, meet peers and take plant tours. They visit other Toyota sites in the United States and Japan. Some good “five-why” thought occurs from checking out their Toyota brethren.

“Why is that plant different than mine?”

“Why are their reliability numbers higher than mine?”

“Why is their safety record better than mine?”

Examinations are made to close the gaps.

Genchi genbutsu: Good things come from walking around someone else’s plant, but equal good can come from standing still in your own.

The practice of genchi genbutsu holds a colorful place in Toyota lore. Countless stories (real and embellished) tell of a new hire being sent out to the shop floor to “go and see.” The person stands or sits in one place for an entire eight-hour shift and takes note of anything of importance. More often than not, the person pinpoints waste and issues related to safety, flow, quality, etc. But he or she may also identify maintenance issues. Perhaps a machine is making uncharacteristic, intermittent noises. Perhaps lubrication procedures are not being properly followed. Perhaps a technician needed to make numerous trips to the tool crib to complete a particular work order. Maybe an operator made improper adjustments to the machine.

An eight-hour standathon is not required in this practice. The bottom line is: To know the problem, you need to see the problem.

Total Productive Maintenance: The benefits of TPM are well-documented. The more maintenance activities that can be shifted to the operator, the more time technicians have for productive, proactive work.

At TMMK, operators are involved with tasks ranging from lubrication, filtration, calibration and minor repairs. In the weld shop, they perform the tip changes on welding robots. Overall, assignments vary based on operation complexity and safety.

“Over the years, I’ve seen fewer tasks termed as ‘skilled work,’” says Absher. “Skilled work has taken on an entirely different meaning because of the rapid advancement of technology.”

Visual controls: This tool is closely tied to TPM. Basically, it is a method of visually conveying information.

Gauge taping is a simple example. Color-coded tape is applied to a gauge in pie-shaped sections to pinpoint levels that are proper (green zone), elevated (yellow) and high (red). A newly hired operator may know nothing about his machine, but he can draw a conclusion from that visual. “It’s in the red. I better tell someone.” Quicker identification of potential issues leads to fewer breakdowns and shorter outages.

“The person calls you and says ‘this and this is out of standard.’ In the 90 seconds it takes to get there, you should already be troubleshooting in your head,” says Absher. “That saves time.”

Quality circles: A small group of team members meet on a regular basis to identify and solve problems. These people raise the level of quality, efficiency and other aspects of work performance.

“The experts – production, maintenance and facilities personnel – determine how to make improvements to processes and remove waste from the system,” says Bremer.

The Numbers Add Up
The items mentioned are just nine of the tools that Toyota maintenance departments have at their disposal to reduce maintenance and increase overall plant reliability. There is just as much maintenance applicability in other TPS tools, including 5-S, hoshin, jidoka, jishuken, kanban, nemawashi, poka-yoke and yokaten.

The bottom line is that TMMK is not trying to reduce maintenance 50 percent through a two-week kaizen event or any other single tool. That’s not the Toyota way. By taking a plethora of tools traditionally thought of as benefiting production and translating and applying them into the maintenance world, the chances of realizing goals – even “impossible dream” goals – increase.

By utilizing Toyota Production System tools
like heijunka, five-whys, visual controls and
genchi genbutsu, the TMMK maintenance
organization is becoming a fine-tuned machine.

Kaizen events might reduce maintenance 12 percent. TPM might supply 8 percent. Intelligent maintenance systems might return 5 percent. 5-S . . . perhaps 4 percent. And so on and so on. Pretty soon, MR-50 doesn’t seem that impossible.

You don’t have to be Superman, or even Toyota for that matter, to make groundbreaking, meaningful change.

A Toyota saying goes that “there can be no successful monozukuri (making things) without hito-zukuri (making people).” Developing all those involved with maintenance and reliability into kaizen-minded problem-solvers, and then giving those people the time, tools and support needed to pursue best practices, can radically change the numbers for your department, your plant and your company. Enhanced reputation, production, market share, etc., are within your reach.

If you don’t think you can apply this, start asking “Why?”

The 5-S method is a structured management program to implement workplace organisation and standardisation. 5-S improves safety, work efficiency, improves productivity and establishes a sense of ownership. And a well-organized workplace motivates people.

The program is called 5-S, since all steps start with an "S":

1. Sort deals with the contents of a workplace, and removes all items that are not needed there.

2. Set in Order refers to "a place for everything, and everything in its place" to enable easy acces to needed items.

3. Shine refers not just to cleaning, but to "being proud" about the way the workplace is organised.

4. Standardize refers to having standards that everyone has to adhere to. Visual management is an important aspect to facilitate easy undersanding of these standards.

5. Sustain refers to the interaction between employees and management to incorporate the continuous improvement culture.

The 5-S management program facilitates an excellent performance:

Safety: A well-organized and orderly workplace is a safer workplace. 5S activities remove clutter, visual indicators alarm people for hazardous situations.

Improving production efficiency: 5-S supports a smooth production process in various ways. Searching for tools is eliminated, flow principles are applied, tools storage is done where they are needed most. Location indicators visualize how things have been organized, and non conformaties are seen at once.

Quality improvement: Daily activities like inspection help to keep the production process in the right condition. Defects are prevented because deviations are spotted before they result into defects.

The training package has been produced in co-operation with Philips Electronics, Smit Transformers, Nacco Materials Handling Group, Minkels and Timmerije (injection molding).

"This training package has helped us enormously to implement 5-S in a structural way, as well as getting our operators and management team behind it. The teams themselves are now taking the initiative,"
Fred Waij, TPM manager, Heineken Breweries.

For more information, visit www.5straining.eu.

Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is a concept utilized in a lean manufacturing implementation. OEE is becoming a commonly utilized maintenance metric within lean organizations.

The OEE concept normally measures the effectiveness of a machine center or process line, but can be utilized in non-manufacturing operations, also.

The high-level formula for the lean manufacturing OEE is:

OEE = Availability X Productivity X Quality.  

Abbreviated, it is OEE = A X P X Q.

The “Availability” portion of the equation measures the percentage of time the equipment or operation was running compared to the available time. For example, if a machine was available to run 16 hours but was only run for 12, then the “Availability” is 75 percent (12/16). The four hours when the machine didn’t run would be setup time, breakdown or other down time. The eight hours the company did not plan to run the machine is rarely used in the calculation.

The “Performance” portion of the equation measures the running speed of the operation compared to its maximum capability, often called the rated speed. For example, if a machine produced 70 pieces per hour while running but the capability of the machine is 100, then the “Performance” is 70 percent (70/100). The concept can be used multiple ways depending on the capability number. For example, the machine might be capable of producing 100 pieces per hour with the perfect part, but only 90 on that particular order. When the capability of 100 is used for the calculation, the result is more a measure of facility OEE. For example, the sales department may take an order for a part than can only be produced at 90 per hour, which negatively affects OEE.

The “Quality” portion of the equation measures the number of good parts produced compared to the total number of parts made. For example, if 100 parts are made and 90 of them are good, the “Quality” is 90 percent (90/100).

Combining the above example into the OEE equation, the OEE is:

OEE = 75% X 70% X 90% = 47.25%

As you can see, an OEE of 100 percent would require a machine to produce good quality every second of the available time at its top rated speed.

The key to using OEE is in the analysis. For example, if the “Availability” is 70 percent, the 30 percent of time for breakdowns, setup and downtime should be analyzed for improvement opportunities.

The most effective use of OEE is to break down the losses into smaller buckets of “opportunity”. A 50 percent OEE doesn’t mean much without any detail.

The OEE goal depends on the process, setup times and order quantities. For example, a machine that produces 10 orders per day with a 30-minute setup time would have 300 minutes reduced from the Availability equation. Conversely, a machine that runs one order all day would only have 30 minutes of setup time. These facts make it difficult to compare two machines’ OEE numbers. The value is in the analysis and comparison of a machine’s OEE in one period vs. another. The comparison may also become meaningless if the order quantities vary significantly day to day.

Knowing the complete OEE breakdown, the opportunities for improvement become apparent. The largest opportunities should be improved first, working down the list until all opportunities are improved.

The improvement opportunities are always in one of the following “buckets”.

• Breakdown
• Setup
• Downtime
• Speed loss
• Small stops
• Quality

OEE is an excellent way of communicating the improvement opportunities to everyone, including operators, maintenance technicians, sales representatives, engineers and managers.

Most lean manufacturing tools work together to create value in the system and eliminate “waste”. OEE is a prime example of this integration of tools.

Many lean implementations begin with a concept called “5-S” and value stream mapping. The value stream map shows where the waste occurs in the system. OEE analysis can be applied at the point where the waste occurs. The improvement in the OEE number will take the use of other lean applications, such as SMED (setup reduction), TPM (Total Productive Maintenance), standardized operations and “kaizen events” targeting specific areas.

It is important in a lean manufacturing implementation to use the correct tools at the right time. Many lean implementations have failed because organizations failed to grasp a deep understanding of all lean concepts.  

The tools should be “picked” based on the opportunities in the organization, rather than “fit” into the organization. When an organization forces tools that don’t apply, it creates chaos and credibility problems.

OEE is a powerful lean manufacturing tool, especially when combined with other tools using an integrated approach.  

About the author:
Carl Wright is an industrial engineer, ASQ Six Sigma blackbelt and master blackbelt. For more information on lean manufacturing and Six Sigma, visit Wright’s Web site at www.1stcourses.com.

If your company uses lean practices to improve plant operations and business performance, or if you’re considering a lean transformation, you’re not alone. In recent years, more companies have adopted lean as a continuous improvement method to improve profitability, enhance customer satisfaction and maintain a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Within lean practices is a growing concept called “visual workplace,” also known as visual factory or visual management, and it’s a critical part of any lean initiative. Visual workplace helps sustain lean operations by using visual tools to ensure that improvements remain clearly visible, readily understood and consistently adhered to long after the lean event is over.

Opportunities to Reduce Waste
Businesses are often surprised to learn that only a small fraction of their activities actually add value for their customers. In a lean workplace, “waste” is any activity that adds no value for a customer. It’s not uncommon that 50 percent or more of a facility’s activities are considered waste.

A primary cause of waste is information deficits – employees simply lack the knowledge they need to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. They may not fully understand their priorities or deadlines, nor the proper way to perform tasks. This leads employees to waste valuable time and motion searching, asking, waiting, retrieving, reworking or just plain giving up.

A visual workplace is self-explanatory: It displays information that’s visible at a glance and at the point of use, eliminates questions and ensures that best practices are followed. By clearly displaying information such as instructions, warnings, standards and other critical operations knowledge, visual tools help to properly guide employee actions. These tools also make it easier to detect abnormalities in products, equipment and processes, and provide workers with real-time feedback on where they stand against goals and expectations.

According to Gwendolyn Galsworth, Ph.D. and author of “Visual Workplace, Visual Thinking”, an effective implementation of visual systems at client companies has resulted in the following dramatic improvements:

• 15 percent increase in throughput
• 70 percent cut in materials handling
• 60 percent decrease in floor space
• 80 percent decrease in flow distance
• 68 percent reduction in rack storage
• 50 percent decrease in annual physical inventory time
• 96 percent decrease in defects

Clearly, visual workplace plays a key role in creating the empowered, creative and aligned work culture that is the end goal of any lean transformation.

Visuality Encompasses All Lean Concepts
Visual workplace techniques represent a critical component of lean concepts, including 5-S, standard work, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), just-in-time (JIT) inventory management and kanban-based pull production. Here are some ideas on how visual devices can be put to profitable use in your lean initiatives.

5-S workplace organization: This technique focuses on sorting, cleaning and organizing to set the foundation for a stable work environment. Visual devices help maintain long-term visual order by clearly identifying aisles, storage areas and locations for equipment, tools, parts and products. Visuals such as bin markers, floor marking tapes, shadow boards and tool ID labels ensure that items are consistently returned to their proper place, eliminating wasted search and retrieval time.

Standard work and quick changeover: Visual tools ensure that workers readily understand proper setup, operating and inspection procedures. Instead of just storing information in binders and computer drives, post critical information clearly right at the point of use. In mixed work environments, use color-coding to identify the proper parts and tools for the job at hand. You’ll simplify training, prevent mistakes, reduce cycle times and improve safety.

Total Productive Maintenance: Identifying abnormalities at a glance is a key objective of TPM. Once equipment has been center-lined, visual devices such as multi-color gauge labels and oil level indicators can clearly indicate when operating conditions are out of spec. Visual devices also help machine operators perform autonomous maintenance tasks by clearly identifying preventive maintenance (PM) points and indicating the correct use of grease and lubricants.

JIT and kanban: A key goal of lean is to eliminate excess inventory. The concepts of just-in-time inventory management and kanban-based pull production help achieve these goals by ensuring that product is produced only in the time and amount needed. Visual reorder indicators control stocking levels for inventory, and kanban cards are used to prevent excess production.

Lean metrics and management: Open communication is a hallmark of a lean business. Employees need to know what is expected of them and how they’re performing. Visual displays such as scoreboards, scheduling charts, team communication boards and recognition displays all help to keep information flowing between employees, work, departments and upper management.

Make Your Own Visuals
The right printing system can be an essential tool for creating a visual workplace, allowing you to make signs, labels, tags and more on demand. Two printers popular among lean and visual workplace practitioners include Brady’s versatile benchtop GlobalMark printer and the portable HandiMark printer. Some of their benefits include:

• Simple and fast: Eliminate cutting, drawing and preparing visual devices by hand. Visuals are quickly and easily designed on computer, then printed and automatically cut to size.
  
• Print on demand: No time wasted placing orders or waiting for visuals to be delivered from outside vendors.
  
• Economical: Create customized visuals for significantly less than those produced at sign shops or commercial printers.
  
• Professional: Create sign-shop-quality visuals that are easy to read at a glance. Eliminate amateurish drawings and hard-to-read handwriting.
  
• Durable: Brady thermal transfer printers provide better abrasion, moisture, chemical and UV resistance than inkjet or laser printing. Moreover, visuals stick and stay stuck to even curved and textured surfaces like pipes, walls and floors.
  
• Standardized: User-customizable templates promote consistency and ensure that visual devices used by different groups and sites have the same look and formatting.
  
• Colorful: Multiple color capability adds impact and clarity to visual markers.

Whichever lean tools you use, visual thinking can reinforce and sustain improvements throughout your plant. There’s much to be gained by creating a workplace where employees are guided by visual information that tells them at a glance what to do, how to do it properly, and where to quickly find what they need. The accompanying boost in productivity, quality, capacity, on-time delivery and equipment reliability will make your facility leaner than ever.

About the author:
Chris Rutter is the senior marketing manager for Brady Worldwide Inc. For more information on visual workplace and Brady’s identification solutions, call 888-250-3089 or visit www.bradyid.com/visualworkplace.

For more info on Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, her company QMI or her book “Visual Workplace, Visual Thinking” visit www.visualworkplace.com.

This vodcast provides a presentation on the subject of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), an important lean manufacturing tool.

Access this 3-minute, 15-second vodcast by clicking on the link below.

Two complementary philosophies form a powerful combination to change the organizational culture and establish a process for continuous improvement. The Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) approach, based on people and process, transforms culture and the way we view our assets. The Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) approach can be daunting, although it establishes a strong foundation for a maintenance strategy. Individually, both have been monumental approaches to maintenance excellence, but when combined have been proven to reduce downtime and increase productivity.

SKF has made a decision to change the way it view its assets. Our assets – like yours – are invaluable. Could it be as simple as to make a decision to change?

Complementary Philosophies
By supporting the TPM process, in particular the Planned Maintenance & Autonomous Maintenance pillars, the RCM methodology will further solidify the maintenance management foundation and facilitate continuous improvement. You can conclusively gain a maintenance program based on the organization’s overall business goals. What we all must first understand is that before anyone goes anywhere (i.e. “world-class” production and maintenance) or does anything (i.e. “working smarter instead of harder”) – a decision has to be made on all levels of the organization to change.

SKF learned this first-hand from one of our Automotive Division factories in South America. In a highly competitive market, this factory found it difficult to gain the competitive advantage with traditional behavior concerning production and maintenance. When faced with closure looming in the years ahead, they decided to make a change. In order to stay open and nobly save many jobs in the process, this factory chose TPM as the catalyst to change. Sometime later, SKF had adopted this philosophy as one of their ways to build a foundation for World-Class Manufacturing Excellence.

Since adopting TPM, SKF began to realize the missing ingredient, reliability thinking. The adaptation was first thought to be RCM, but it was later found to be more adept to use the SKF SRCM process. Why? RCM is particularly useful and feasible for maintenance of identical installations (like aircraft), but given the operational context and the maintainability of our assets, it was not the case.

Another issue was that a certain level of maintenance maturity is required to ensure accurate and complete asset data. It was difficult to gauge and to ensure that everyone would be at equivalent levels. Based on irregularity of assets and irresolute maintenance maturity, SKF chose SKF SRCM.

SKF SRCM is a maintenance strategy review process that provides virtually the same results as classical RCM, but uses an efficient process to define needs and focus appropriate efforts on critical and non-critical equipment, functions and systems. Both TPM and SKF SRCM have been integrated, and the Planned Maintenance Pillar of TPM has been since redesigned. The impacts not only affect the Planned Maintenance pillar, but have a cascading effect on all pillars that SKF has chosen to implement. The chosen pillars, in no particular order, are Focused Improvement, Training and Education, Planned Maintenance, and Autonomous Maintenance with a foundation of 5-S.

Total Productive Maintenance
TPM, a Japanese philosophy used in many facets of industry, seeks to increase productivity by eliminating any waste of effort. TPM is attractive to many different industries but has proved well in line and batch manufacturing. The idea began in 1951 when preventive maintenance was introduced to Japan from the USA. Nippondenso, part of Toyota, was the first company in Japan to introduce plant-wide preventive maintenance in 1960.(5)

After some realizations were made, the workload was too much for maintenance alone. A shared maintenance relationship between operators and maintenance was implemented called planned and autonomous maintenance. This has since grown into the eight pillars we commonly know today as Kobetsu Kaizen, Autonomous Maintenance, Planned Maintenance, Training and Education, Early Equipment Management, Safety Hygiene & the Environment, Quality Maintenance, and TPM in the Office. Many different organizations alter TPM and make it unique to their company’s philosophies; however, the concept and inner progressions remain mostly the same.

Reliability-Centered Maintenance
RCM can be briefly explained as a structured process, originally developed in the airline industry, to determine the equipment maintenance strategies required for any physical asset to ensure that it continues to fulfill its intended functions in its present operating context.

The assets are decomposed, extensively analyzed and described, failure modes and effects analyses (FMEA) are made for the most critical components, and the maintenance organization and processes are carefully (re)defined.(1)

To make an austere statement, RCM was derived from a process to help keep airplanes from falling out of the sky and to make nuclear power plants from being the next Chernobyl-like disaster.

RCM was developed in the U.S. commercial aviation industry in the late 1960s. RCM was then adopted by U.S. Department of Defense in 1970s. RCM was identified by the USA Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in 1984 as a candidate for application to nuclear power plants. Furthermore, three pilot applications were sponsored by EPRI from 1985 to 1987; they all were single-system studies that were initiated.

To further clarify what RCM is and is not, a standard from the Society of Automotive Engineers was developed known as SAE JA10112 and can be found at www.SAE.org. This standard provides an evaluation criterion to eliminate any questions of whether or not the so-called RCM process is true to its roots to ensure that the asset continues to fulfill its intended functions in its present operating context.

The seven criteria simplified are as follows:

1. What are the functions and operating context?
2. How can it fail to achieve these functions?
3. What makes a functions failure become true?
4. What is the result of this true failure?
5. What is outcome of the result and its defined significance?
6. What must be done to eliminate failure?
7. What must be done if failure cannot be eliminated?

First Steps First
SKF decided to make a change and chose a vehicle. We then altered that vehicle to meet our needs and address the culture. Simple TPM and SKF SRCM were the sponsored methods. These two methods when combined would only be the starting point for World-Class Manufacturing Excellence. Many other areas such as Six Sigma, energy efficiency, etc., need to be sprinkled in and they all have to be well balanced with one another. Proprietary reasons restrict some content of how, but if focusing only on the Planned Maintenance pillar of TPM, the main points can be highlighted and conveyed.

This change was not only needed on the manufacturing floor, but by the management team as well. SKF needed to open its eyes to see in a different way. Benchmarking was the first key metric. Gauging our performance against other manufacturing industries across the globe was vital. SKF did have pockets of “best practices” internally, but it would be more powerful to compare external organizations. It would assist in driving home the need for change.

Five Key Ways SKF Improved
Visiting companies like Bosch, Tetra Pak, Fiat and Unilever (among others) gave a foundation to create a gap analysis to accurately measure our current situation when compared to SKF’s vision. The gap analysis as well as the SKF Client Needs Analysis (CNA) are the tools that are used. SKF needed to measure production and maintenance maturity.

These tools are easy enough to relay information between the individual manufacturing facilities around the world to a centralized location. The gap analyses and the CNA are an ongoing effort that is usually carried out on a yearly frequency to check progress and address weak areas.

Organizational structure was very much needed. Why? In a global organization, it is impractical to have a small or large group located centrally to make global change.

It took some time to configure the most appropriate organizational structure. There typically is no right or wrong way, but there certainly are by-products from poor organizational structure. A bottom-up approach was the preferred way. SKF has found that it constantly must change in order to address new issues and promote continuous improvements. The diagram below depicts the bottom-up approach and where support was aligned for continuous improvement.

Figure 1. Top-down approach for organizational structure.

Consultancy is a key area that continues to make a difference. When SKF does not have the resources or internal availability, it must be supplemented. We have called on TPM consultants, as well as other content experts, to provide assistance to SKF in order to transform globally. Due to the nature of consultants, their deliverables match precisely with what the needs are of the organization. Good quality consultants are a must for SKF to better understand its current situation and to gain competitive advantage over where the opposition is headed.

Business Process Management (BPM) is something that has emerged recently in the context of BPM systems. BPM systems allow management and engineers alike to analyze and measure effectiveness of business processes. Using a rudimentary BPM system, SKF’s Industrial Division and Service Division joined forces and overlaid Asset Efficiency Optimization (AEO) using the SKF SRCM process and the Planned Maintenance pillar of TPM. Six fundamental characteristics were identified in the context of planned maintenance:

1. Evaluate the current stage (KPIs and business goal alignment)
2. Repair assets and improve weak points
3. Organize the Computer Maintenance Management System (CMMS)
4. Develop maintenance strategy
5. Implement maintenance strategy
6. Evaluate and sustain maintenance strategy

The final key area that SKF was able to exploit is how and when to use what technologies and techniques. SKF Asset Management Services works closely to prescribe the right medicine for an accurate diagnosis. This is, of course, in the context of maintenance management. It is well proven to gain a quick win is just that – a quick, short win. Part of the decision-making process, as discussed in the
Complementary Philosophies section of this paper, is to decide whether sustained improvements over time is appropriate or if it’s more astute to get some quick wins in order to gain momentum. SKF chose sustained improvements over time.

In conclusion, it is quite simple to decide to do anything. Following through and continuously improving is what most fail to do. Establishing systems and processes and putting them in place matter most for continuous improvement. Could it be as simple as to make a decision to change? The answer, in my opinion, is no; it is what the content is and what we do. It’s not what we merely talk about, but rather actions. This is what is needed in order to achieve the overall vision.

SKF continues to experience results such as reduced downtime, improved throughput, increased efficiency and employee satisfaction due to this decision. Moreover, the choice is yours to make. What will you decide?

References

1. Aptitude Exchange glossary www.aptitudexchange.com
2. Issued August 1999. Evaluation Criteria for Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) Processes, SAE JA 1011. www.sae.org
3. Nowlan FS, Heap HF,. 1978. Reliability Centered Maintenance, National Technical Information Service, U.S. Department of Commerce, Springfield, Va.
4. Roberts J. 1997. "Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)," Department of Industrial and Engineering Technology Texas A&M University-Commerce; The Technology Interface. http://et.nmsu.edu/~etti/fall97/manufacturing/tpm2.html
5. Venkatesh J. revised October 28 2007. An Introduction to Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) http://www.plantmaintenance.com/articles/tpm_intro.shtml

Maintenance manager Robert was up to his elbows in grease and looking for spare parts. On his way to the supply room, he met Ron, the corporate reliability manager. Robert was in a hurry, but he took time to greet Ron and make small conversation. Robert told Ron that when time allowed, he would like to speak with him about several machine reliability issues.

“Where are you headed in such a hurry?” asked Ron.

“The press is down again and I’m looking for parts”, answered Robert.

Ron responded by asking, “When you get it repaired, will it break again?”

“Of course it will. We have a lot of reliability issues with the press.” said Robert.

Ron responded by saying, “Perhaps you’re working on the wrong thing.”

Robert did a quick double-take and chuckled. He thought Ron was joking. “When the press is down, that’s where I need to be. Would you have me working on something that isn’t broken?” chuckled Robert. He realized that Ron wasn’t joking when Ron asked, “Is it possible that the press failed because the maintenance process is broken? A good, reliable maintenance process would help to insure that the press remains in reliable operating condition?”

The conversation was beginning to make Robert feel uncomfortable, and he had important work to do. Robert felt that Ron was a nice man, but was now talking some pie-in-the-sky theory. Walking away, Robert said, “Gotta go, Ron, but we’ll talk about the issues that I mentioned, for sure, when we get up and running. Nice seeing you.”

Except for the names, the above conversation is true and demonstrates that most equipment failures are a result of failed reliability processes. This article covers many of the reasons why equipment reliability processes fail. The authors have personally observed all of the reasons for reliability process failure discussed in this paper.

Failure Mode: Implementation Failure
It can be rightfully argued that all equipment reliability process (EqRP) failure modes are somehow tied to poor implementation. Not establishing an initial direction is a critical mistake in the implementation process. Establishing clear goals and expectations and a clear direction can increase the success rate of an EqRP. If upper management fails to communicate the expectations of the program, accountability can never be achieved. The authors have witnessed millions of dollars being dumped into reliability processes that had no established direction and goals. The Penn State manual Operating Equipment Asset Management identifies some critical elements that should not be overlooked when instituting the EqRP.

Top-down vision, drive, participation, support and clear, ambitious objectives are elements that should not be overlooked on implementation. It’s a good idea to examine this entire publication before implementing an EqRP.

Failure Mode: Not Understanding the EqRP (Equipment Reliability Process)
Sometimes a company will have the best of intentions for implementing an EqRP, but no one in the company may have an understanding of how machine reliability is achieved. Sometimes a person in the company may have the necessary knowledge, but they are overruled on important issues that could insure success of the EqRP. Knowing how to maintain equipment for the desired reliability requires knowledge that is acquired through training. If that knowledge isn’t present, no EqRP will bring plant reliability. There are a few good ways to maintain machines and thousands of poor ways, but there is only one best way for any given machine. It is critical to choose one of the good processes and work toward making it the best EqRP for your plant. In short, it isn’t possible to maintain a machine to required reliability if machine reliability isn’t fully understood. If managers and plant personnel don’t truly understand the EqRP, they will lack confidence in the process and will be destined to failure. Many EqRPs fail simply because the managers and practitioners don’t have confidence that it can deliver the required results.

Failure Mode: Lack of Accountability
These days, we hear much about empowerment self-direction. This sometimes leads to the idea that everyone can do their own thing as long as they do those things with good intentions. The authors are strongly in support of empowerment and a self-directed workforce as long as the empowered conform to the directives of the EqRP. The EqRP is not perfect and will need to be continuously revised and improved, but the basic framework, if correct when chosen, should remain intact. Any modification should be subject to a formal management of change. Everyone in the plant needs to be held accountable for their work.

Corporate managers often fail to keep the EqRP on track by letting small factions steer off course with practices that vary from the EqRP. This is the result of the corporate manager either not understanding the EqRP or not having confidence in the EqRP. Too often, corporations turn over the management of an EqRP to managers who have had success in non-maintenance areas, but have little or no reliability experience. Combine the lack of reliability experience with no established goals or direction and you have induced a failure mode right out of the gate. How can people be held accountable when they don’t know what is expected from them?

Failure Mode: Market Conditions Cause a Change in Plans
Too often, companies are willing to invest in various programs when times are good. Sometimes this is even to the point of waste. But when markets go sour, policies are changed in order to conserve dollar assets. In such times, EqRPs may have funds cut to the point that past gains are lost. The EqRP may not survive a bad market. Companies should develop spending strategies that are stable regardless of market conditions. A wasted dollar can never be recovered. Some producer will sell products even in down markets. The lowest-cost, highest-quality producers will survive difficult times. A good EqRP is an important factor in enabling a company to be the low-cost, high-quality producer.

Failure Mode: Commitment Falters over Time
When mangers fail in the implementation of the reliability process, it allows other failure modes to begin eroding the program. If the direction and expectations are not initially established, accountability has no teeth. Without accountability, the commitment from upper management becomes viewed by the people as being more relaxed with each and every sunrise. Before long, even upper management forgets the initial purpose of the program. As the perceived importance of the EqRP lessens, the commitment is shifted to other programs or issues.

Failure Mode: Failure to Measure Results
You can’t measure what you can’t quantify, and what gets measured gets done. The difference between a well-designed metrics system and a poor one can be detrimental to improvement efforts. A metric is essentially a clear, quantitative, objective measure to assess performance in a particular area or progress toward a goal. A good computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) coordinator can pay big dividends when helping establish metrics and deciding how data needs to be measured within the CMMS. Most systems can generate good, consistent reports if it is set up to do so. However, most of these systems are grossly underutilized, and companies are too dependent on CMMS coordinators to decide what can be measured and what can’t be measured. The metrics should be established by a committee with the EqRP goals in mind.

Six Sigma has been used on the process side in a lot of companies for sometime now. It could be argued that the utilization of black belts and green belts on the maintenance side could be beneficial, and in some companies, they are utilized in that capacity. But in the author’s experience, that generally was not the case. Managers sometimes concentrate on standard deviation of product moisture content and overlook mean time between failures. Assessment results can’t be consistent without good, solid metrics. Too many times, the authors have witnessed variations in assessment scores from one facility to the next because of inadequate metrics, peer pressure and managerial perception. Nothing can compromise the integrity of an assessment process more than the perceived inconsistencies of the assessment team’s scoring procedures.

Failure Mode: Cultural Integration
A company may establish a reliability steering committee, select champions and mentors, even train their entire workforce on cultural change. They may then hire outside people to oversee the EqRP. Is it really a good idea to hire outside people to fill roles such as plant reliability engineers, planners, schedulers, plant managers and maintenance managers, especially, if these people have little or no reliability experience? Sometimes the outside people may come from a completely different industry that doesn’t understand the manufacturing process or from the same industry but from a run-to-fail culture. Fosters of EqRPs should guard against infiltration of cultural integration. If people are brought in from different cultures, they should be in complimentary roles and trained in the company’s culture before taking on major roles in the EqRP. Too often, a little outside influence causes regression back into the run-to-fail maintenance of yesterday.

Failure Mode: Lack of a Strategy for Managing Equipment
Even though condition-based monitoring methods may be established, strategies for managing equipment are still needed. Condition monitoring is a requirement for good machine management, but other strategies also should be incorporated into the EqRP. Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) are two good tools that should be considered to help with the management of equipment reliability. Consider setting up pilot machine centers and conduct RCM or TPM projects. The information learned from these pilot projects can then be transferred to similar machine centers in other facilities.

Failure Mode: Low-Hanging Fruit Syndrome
When these types of programs are initiated, the benefits are quite obvious. Just about everything attempted – from instituting an oil cleanliness program to condition monitoring or failure analysis – reaps big initial benefits and everyone is happy. But, just as soon as the low-hanging fruit is picked, a program with no direction or structure starts to look more like a dog chasing its tail. Unfortunately, this happens too often in industry. Someone suggests an EqRP and it seems like a good idea when you look around and see all of the potential for improvement. But, the EqRP is an ever-changing process and every bit of beneficial juice has to be squeezed out of the reliability process.

Both authors agree that all of the potential failure modes of an EqRP seem to point to several key elements, such as commitment to reliability, accountability and sustainability. We have witnessed some success and eventual regression of EqRPs based on some or all of these failure modes. There are other failure modes, but the ones mentioned here have been witnessed by the authors.

About the authors:
Gary Fore, CMRP, has 22 years in the energy and building products industries, specializing in reliability engineering with a heavy emphasis on condition monitoring. He holds a bachelors of science degree in mechanical engineering and an associates of applied science in electro-mechanical technology. His certifications include: Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional (Society for Maintenance & Reliability Professionals), Category III vibration analyst (Vibration Institute), CLS (Certified Lubrication Specialist), Level II infrared thermographer, and Machine Lubricant Analyst Level I (International Council for Machinery Lubrication).

Bill Hillman has 30 years experience in the steel industry and six years in the wood products industry. His entire career has been in equipment asset management, of which more than 20 years have been in predictive maintenance. Bill is a Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional, past chairman on the board of the International Council for Machinery Lubrication, certified by the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers, and a certified infrared thermographer. He holds or previously held certifications by the Vibration Institute, NDT in ultrasonics, magnetic particle testing, and liquid penetrant testing. He is trained in Reliability-Centered Maintenance and is an experienced RCM facilitator. Bill is also trained in Total Productive Maintenance and 5-S. He is now a managing partner of Asset Management Specialists Company. Bill can be contacted at billcmrp@yahoo.com or 903-407-9488.

As we conduct lean assessments at manufacturing facilities throughout the region, I have noticed organizations increasingly embracing lean concepts. But one key area that often falls by the wayside is equipment maintenance. I repeatedly see facilities in which there is a complacent attitude about equipment maintenance and reliability. “Equipment is expected to fail.” Maintenance is primarily reactive. Where they exist, preventive maintenance plans are sketchy, often ignored, and not used because “we’re experienced.” Large inventories of spare parts are stored in conditions that significantly reduce their useful life. Operators ignore the early warning signs of pending failure. Furthermore, I always hear at least 10 reasons why “we can’t change the way we do things around here.”

What if other industries took the same path as these organizations? Take, for example, the aircraft maintenance industry. There is a high degree of discipline from the certifications of those who perform the maintenance to the suppliers of parts and materials used on the job. Procedures are very specific, and every process and step is documented. Consequently, with more than 27,000 takeoffs and landings every day in the United States, aircraft crashes due to equipment failure rarely happen. Another good example is NASCAR Winston Cup racing. The best-of-the-best in stock car racing depend on reliable equipment to do their job; every race car must meet rigid safety guidelines and has to be reliable. The old saying in the pits is: “If you can’t finish, you can’t win.” Achieving 100 percent reliability takes discipline and teamwork. Organizations that want to compete and become “world class” need to successfully implement Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) programs.

TPM requires effective leadership from the start. That is part of the meaning of “total” in Total Productive Maintenance. Without effective leadership that links TPM efforts to the business and holds people accountable for performing highly specified work, equipment performance and reliability will continue to decline and TPM initiatives will be short-lived. Many of today’s business leaders have risen through the ranks when maintenance was only responsible for “fixing things” – not for preventing problems. Viewing maintenance as a non-value-adding support function, they often subject the maintenance department to severe cost-cutting; this usually results in higher costs due to decreased equipment effectiveness.

Companies that have been successful usually follow an implementation plan that includes the following 12 steps:

Step 1:Announcement of TPM. Top management needs to create an environment that will support the introduction of TPM. Without the support of management, skepticism and resistance will kill the initiative.

Step 2:Launch a formal education program. This program will inform and educate everyone in the organization about TPM activities, benefits and the importance of contribution from everyone.

Step 3:Create an organizational support structure. This group will promote and sustain TPM activities once they begin. Team-based activities are essential to a TPM effort. This group needs to include members from every level of the organization – from management to the shop floor. This structure will promote communication and will guarantee everyone is working toward the same goals.

Step 4:Establish basic TPM policies and quantifiable goals. Analyze the existing conditions and set goals that are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-based.

Step 5:Outline a detailed master deployment plan. This plan will identify what resources will be needed and when for training, equipment restoration and improvements, maintenance management systems and new technologies.

Step 6: TPM kick-off. Implementation will begin at this stage.

Step 7: Improve the effectiveness of each piece of equipment. Project teams will analyze each piece of equipment and make the necessary improvements.

Step 8 :Develop an autonomous maintenance program for operators. Operators’ routine cleaning and inspection will help stabilize conditions and stop accelerated deterioration.

Step 9:Develop a planned or preventive maintenance program. Create a schedule for preventive maintenance on each piece of equipment.

Step 10:Conduct training to improve operation and maintenance skills. The maintenance department will take on the role of teachers and guides to provide training, advice and equipment information to the teams.

Step 11:Develop an early equipment management program. Apply preventive maintenance principles during the design process of equipment.

Step 12:Continuous improvement. As in any lean initiative, the organization needs to develop a continuous improvement mind-set.

Maintenance and reliability as a core business strategy is key to a successful TPM implementation. Without the support of top management, TPM will be just another “flavor of the month.” Implementing TPM using the above 12 steps will start you on the road to “zero breakdowns” and “zero defects.”

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About the author:
David McBride is co-founder of EMS Consulting Group ( http://www.emsstrategies.com), a Carlsbad, Calif.-based engineering and management consulting firm. David has a bachelors of science degree in mechanical engineering from Ohio State University. He has a successful track record in the development and implementation of Failure Modes and Effects Analysis and Design for Manufacturability programs at several organizations and has greatly reduced manufacturing costs through the utilization of lean manufacturing, kaizen events and manufacturing system analysis. He has also been highly successful at developing and executing new product introduction processes, and staffing and capital equipment plans. To contact David about this article, send an e-mail to davidm@emsstrategies.com.

Informance International, a leader in manufacturing business and enterprise manufacturing intelligence solutions, announced March 8 that Unilever, one of the world's largest consumer packaged goods companies, has chosen to expand the deployment of the Informance software solution across all of its plants in the Americas. The deployment is part of Unilever's Total Productive Maintenance program (TPM) aimed at enhancing manufacturing performance in efficiency and quality across the region.

The move toward a standardized approach to drive and sustain manufacturing operations performance is the next chapter in the long-time relationship between Unilever and Informance. Unilever's expansion into additional plants, including those in the ice cream business, brings to 21 the number of plants utilizing this technology and includes Informance's software-as-a-service (SaaS) hosted solution. The system and software allows manufacturers to leverage real-time performance intelligence in order to assess improvement opportunities, align plant tactics with corporate strategies, and exercise the most efficient use of the information to sustain the effects of operational excellence activities.

According to Terry Herber, manager of supply chain capabilities Americas of Unilever, "Informance allows us to apply TPM loss elimination principles across our plants. For many years, we have used Informance in plants to tackle OEE (overall equipment effectiveness). We now have visibility of this information regardless of where you sit and can help replicate the improvement gains across multiple factories."

Consumer goods manufacturers are constantly looking at improving efficiencies across their supply chains. Global manufacturers report that simple OEE tools are not adequate to drive the improvement agenda, and leading manufacturers look to solutions that deliver facts, pervasive visibility, and maximum knowledge transfer, along with real-time data to drive their efficiency and optimization plans.

"We are proud to partner with Unilever to help them achieve their performance goals," said Sunil Singh, CEO of Informance. "It's not just about helping them advance their operational excellence initiative, but further enabling them to quantify and report the financial impact of improvements, and to contribute to financial performance through those actions that will have the greatest impact with the least investment."

Informance is already a leading provider of Manufacturing Intelligence solutions, leading the market in offering Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI) Software as A Services (SaaS) subscription solutions. "This on-site hosted model has enormous benefits for Unilever for deploying on a regional scale," said John Oskin, executive vice president of Informance. "Informance Advisory Services, coupled with a quick deployment model, will enable us to accelerate the impact on their operations."

About Unilever
Unilever's mission is to add vitality to life. They meet everyday needs for nutrition, hygiene and personal care with brands that help people feel good, look good and get more out of life. Unilever is one of the world's leading suppliers of fast moving consumer goods with strong local roots in more than 100 countries across the globe. Its portfolio includes some of the world's best known and most loved brands including thirteen EUR 1 billion brands and global leadership in many categories in which the company operates. The portfolio features brand icons such as Knorr, Wall's, Flora, Dove, Axe/Lynx, Omo/Persil/Skip, Marmite and Pot Noodle. Unilever has around 174,000 employees in approaching 100 countries and generated annual sales of EUR 40 billion in 2009.

About Informance International
Informance delivers Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI) solutions to help clients accelerate operational performance initiatives, drive operating strategies and capture actionable insight; measured by speed-to-value. Using Informance, manufacturing teams can drive corporate initiatives like lean, Six Sigma, TPM and other continuous improvement methods. Clients quickly unlock hidden capacity, increase productivity without additional capital investment, reduce inventory and labor costs, and increase working capital. 

Total Productive Maintenance is a manufacturing-led initiative that emphasises the importance of people, a "can do" and continuous improvement philosophy. TPM seeks to reshape the organization to liberate its own potential. This video shows KCTS in action delivering a 10-day TPM instructor course to 32 delegates from around the world.

Access this 9-minute, 25-second video by clicking on the link below.

This video features photos of sub-standard working conditions on American plant floors. These situations would be greatly remedied with a renewed focus on maintenance, particularly Total Productive Maintenance.

It is important to understand up front that Total Productive Maintenance is the most difficult of all the “lean tools” to implement in companies for two reasons: 

• A TPM implementation requires the greatest amount of culture change (as compared to implementing other lean tools) from different groups of people within the organization almost simultaneously.
• Of all of the areas of potential lean process improvement within the four walls of an organization, the maintenance of our equipment is the area which is the furthest behind. 

Fortunately, the payback from this implementation – in terms of on-time delivery, reduced scrap, improved productivity and improved associate morale – is probably greater than any of the other lean tools. 
Let's review both of these challenging implementation issues and consider possible solutions.

As we look at the organizational culture change required for the TPM implementation, it is important to remember and review the four components of a successful lean transformation:

To successfully implement TPM (as well as any of the other lean tools), it must be built on a foundation of a lean culture and supported by the lean policy deployment part of lean planning.

The development of a lean culture starts with the establishment of behavioral expectations. Such expectations, or codes of conduct, set the culture baseline. An excellent example from the Wiremold Company is shown below:

For TPM to be successful, two additional cultural changes must occur:  

• Management, in most organizations, has always considered the maintenance department to be a “necessary evil”, an undesirable “indirect” expense. Management has failed to properly lead and manage the maintenance activity. As a result of this treatment, maintenance:
  • Wants to be located as far away from production and management as possible
  • Has little regard for the production process
  • Considers themselves “on call”
  • Uses a “fire-fighting/chicken-wire repair” maintenance strategy
  • Makes excuses for a lack of maintenance improvements                        

This must change. In lean, maintenance activities are known to be the foundation of creating world-class manufacturing processes. 

• The second change is the development of respect for our manufacturing equipment and the products they produce. Often, U.S. organizations buy new equipment, ignore or are unconcerned about proper maintenance procedures and schedules, and then proceed to run the equipment into the ground. Then everyone stands around complaining that what the organization needs is new equipment. They buy new equipment and the cycle repeats.

While visiting Japan, we were told by a Japanese plant manager, who was watching a brand new piece of equipment being unloaded at his facility, that “this was the worst condition this piece of equipment would ever be in.” This reflected a cultural respect for how important the equipment was to their success and how the Japanese never let equipment deteriorate but always try to improve it or make it better (easier to operate, easier to maintain, etc.). 

Additionally, top management must:

• Make TPM a part of their policy deployment goals
• Support the creation of a full-time certified lean facilitator position (organizations with more than 100 people)
• Support, encourage and discuss the organizational role and culture changes that will be required during this transition
• Ignore the red flags that TPM will create if the organization is using a “standard cost” accounting system
• Recognize a world-class-level TPM implementation can take many years (again, of all the lean tools/activities, maintenance is the furthest behind)

Other TPM Implementation Considerations
1) Some thoughts on supporting the maintenance department culture change:

• Treat/respect maintenance as the foundation of our processes (not as an indirect cost!).
• Move maintenance to the center of the processes (if required, 5-S during the move).
• Assign maintenance directly to cells, production lines and value streams (indirectly to maintenance manager).

2) Of the five potential maintenance strategies:
Breakdown – Wait until it breaks then scramble or use the “fire-fighting” strategy, also known as reactive maintenance (this is what many organization are currently doing).
Preventive (planned downtime) – Periodic or scheduled maintenance; e.g.,  oiling, greasing, filter changes, etc., to prevent premature wear and breakdowns, combined with periodic major inspections and overhauls, which prevent equipment performance deterioration.
Predictive– Repair or replace components before failure based on historical information, monitoring equipment operation or life cycles. Life cycles can be based on:

• • number of cycles
  • operating time in minutes or hours
  • calendar time
  • component wear data
  • variations in component operating parameters

Corrective or improvement– Use of “root cause” analysis to determine why a component wore out or failed, followed by equipment modifications or upgrades to prevent recurrence.
Maintenance Prevention– Design or specification of equipment components that do not require maintenance. This can include the design or specification of equipment that is easy to clean, inspect and lubricate.
Preventive and predictive strategies can account for 75 to 90 percent of all improvement in the short term.
3) The key to an effective preventive maintenance component within the TPM initiative is the machine operators. Up to 75 percent of breakdowns can be detected and prevented by well-trained associates.
4) Component failure analysis studies indicate that from 60 to 75 percent of all equipment mechanical failures are a result of lubrication failure (contaminated, wrong type, inadequate or excessive).
5) The cost of a TPM program is optimized (between spending too much and not spending enough) when roughly 90 percent of all maintenance activities are planned and 10 percent are unplanned.
6) Often, a good place to start your TPM overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) measurement system is with equipment availability.
7) Purchase a TPM computer program only after a manual system, which meets the organization data management and analysis requirements, has been developed.
8) Equipment builders who do not support TPM efforts on their already purchased equipment should not be considered for future equipment purchases.

9) Consider using a measurement system like the one used to measure lean supplier performance:

To evaluate new equipment purchases:

About the author:
Larry Rubrich is the president of WCM Associates LLC, a company that is dedicated to helping organizations become globally competitive through the implementation of lean as a business system. For more information, visit www.wcmfg.com or call 260-637-8064.

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) combines the traditionally American practice of preventive maintenance with total quality control and total employee involvement to create a culture where operators develop ownership of their equipment, and become full partners with maintenance, engineering and management to assure that equipment operates properly every day. As part of modern TPM applications, the asset owner/operator performs much, and sometimes all, of the routine autonomous maintenance (AM) tasks.

Autonomous maintenance ideally ensures appropriate and effective efforts are expended since the machine is wholly the domain of one person or team. TPM is a critical adjunct to lean manufacturing. If machine uptime is not predictable and if process capabilities are not sustained, the processes become unstable and production flows will be interrupted. One way to think of TPM is “asset deterioration prevention” and “maintenance prevention”, not fixing/repairing machines in a constant reactive environment. For this reason, TPM is also referred to as “Total Productive Manufacturing” or “Total Process Management”. TPM is a proactive approach that essentially aims to prevent any kind of losses before occurrence. Its motto is “zero error, zero work-related accident and zero loss.”

Reacting to breakdowns and dealing with production losses is unfortunately still a daily routine for most asset-intensive manufacturing organizations. Competition continues to raise the bar, thus increasing pressure on the “cost of goods sold” (COGS) and the opportunity costs of lost production. With the globalization of manufacturing of most products, organizations must compete with low-cost producers and are forced to take action.

What action to take? If it were as easy as hiring a smart leader for manufacturing, every plant would have the shiny wall plaque that illustrates their brilliance for excellent performance. Operational Excellence (OpEx) is based on a holistic asset design, asset care and asset management concept powered by Reliability Excellence (Rx). It requires total collaborative, fully integrated effort by all functional departments at a plant.

Driving an organization toward OpEx is a realistic goal when there is solid Rx program and project management coupled with proven TPM strategies.

From experience, Life Cycle Engineering knows that if the fundamentals of asset reliability are not in place, it is difficult to sustain TPM. Even with significant activities and training, sustainability is a challenge. LCE assures that all Rx elements are in place to support the TPM culture to grow in a responsible manner with the target of achieving Operational Excellence. The goal of this article is to show that a basic asset-centric care program can be an effective foundation for a fully functioning preventive and predictive maintenance and operator care program. Operator care correctly applied can make a profound contribution to any organization implementing a Six Sigma, continuous improvement or similar quality strategy. Most importantly, basic operator care can have a significant positive effect on asset availability coupled with reductions in operations and maintenance expenditures through the achievement of increased asset reliability.

In this article, we will concentrate on some conceptual issues to operator care:

• What is operator care
• Origins of operator care
• Operator care and Six Sigma, CI, other improvement methods
• Operator care as part of the overall asset reliability strategy
• Benefits of TPM/AM operator care programs

What is Operator Care?
Operator care is a commitment by plant management, operations and maintenance to ensure that assets maintain their expected level of quality and volume for output, while reaching their expected life span within the plant. Operator care attempts to greatly reduce or eliminate reactive maintenance and is driven by operations/production. In operator care environments:

• Plant condition is optimum (TPM and 5-S are applied)
• Operators are engaged in asset care
  • Tighten, lubricate, clean, (detect, inspect, correct)
  • Can be autonomous maintenance (AM) (operator-performed maintenance)
• Standard operating procedures are in use
• Reliability and operability is included in the design
• Equipment standardization is evident
• Skills (hard and soft) training is continuous
• Loss elimination is ongoing; overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is being measured
• Small cross-functional teams are solving problems (failure modes and effects analyses, five-why’s, etc.)

TPM is Operator Driven
The operators’ creed of TPM is as follows:

• Keep it clean
• Keep it lubricated
• Monitor for degradation
• Maintain it before production is affected
• Simplify and improve it

These elements are all carried out in a thorough asset care regimen. The investigative part of this regimen also attempts to catch incipient problems by monitoring assets for both visual (qualitative) and measurable (quantitative) indications of change.

Along with the inspection processes of the program, an operator care process focuses on continued education of operators (all shifts), maintenance and reliability staff. Operator care puts high emphasis on both operator-managed inspection programs and lubrication management efforts.

Origins of TPM/AM and Operator Care
In the 1950s, the Japanese industry, faced with considerable challenges, developed a variant of planned maintenance now known as Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). As with planned maintenance, frequent inspections are a fundamental tenet of the TPM process, with a heavy emphasis on involving equipment operators in the inspection process. Operator care is derived from several of the concepts (“pillars”) of TPM. Some of these concepts are found in the sample slides shared below. They are from a TPM conference in India and are courtesy of Shiram Pistons & Rings Ltd., an automotive manufacturer in that country.

4. Fusion of Corporate Management & TPM

7. People Development

Operator Care and Six Sigma, CI, Other Asset Improvement Methods
A Six Sigma (DMAIC) systemic quality program provides businesses with the tools to improve the capability of their business processes. Six Sigma can be defined as a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects in a wide variety of processes, which includes all forms of manufacturing and process industries. A key element of Six Sigma programs is “kaizen”, the Japanese process of continuous improvement using a variety of problem-solving and analysis techniques. One of the fundamentals of the Six Sigma approach is the requirement for data. Data sets are used to determine the original state of a process, the current state of that process, the rate of improvement and the proximity of the process to the desired quality levels. Operator care, with its emphasis on frequent and rigorously scheduled inspections, produces a steady stream of both quantified and qualified evaluations of assets, systems and processes.

The data collected by these inspections, plus the data generated to measure the compliance to the operator care inspection schedule itself, can be used effectively to generate metrics for any Six Sigma program. A well-run basic asset care program is not only a catalyst for improvement in and of itself; it can also be one of the primary data gathering tools to evaluate the effectiveness of all continuous improvement procedures within the plant.

Operator Care is Part of Overall Asset Management and Reliability Strategy
Operator care fits in as a foundational element of a site’s total plant operational and Reliability Excellence strategy. The strategy details the availability and contribution of a plant’s resources to be used in asset inspection, condition monitoring, planning and scheduling, and logistics for the creation of a reliability program. The strategy provides for optimal use of organizational resources with sufficient asset availability to meet the organization’s output requirements.

A modern plant asset management effort uses the skill sets available within the organization (and through the judicious use of external expertise) to generate improvements in all elements of LCE’s Reliability Excellence model (see www.lce.com/Reliability_Excellence_Model_15.html).

The results of implementing all integrated elements holistically can consequently lead to substantial performance improvements, value creation and securing a competitive advantage.

Benefits of TPM/AM Operator Care Programs
Operator care programs have been implemented in hundreds of organizations – both in process and discrete manufacturing facilities. Benefits of a successfully implemented asset care and reliability improvement program include:

• Improvement in OEE
• Manufacturing Cost Trend
• Labor Utilization
• Production Lead Time Trend
• Positive Impact on EHS performance

The table below indicates return of investment (ROI) data of recent successful LCE Rx implementations.

What do you see in this picture? Besides a lack of any real 5-S, what thoughts come to your kaizen mind about the motors?

Perhaps you may think about what are the motors used for? Do we really need them? Are they critical? How fast can we get one if we needed it? What is our process to decide what parts to keep in stock? Or, how much do they cost?

One of the elements of a solid Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) program that does not get much attention is our spare parts. Simply taking good care of our machines and equipment does not entirely eliminate the chance of them breaking down. When that happens, the fire drill begins.

Go to any maintenance department in any company in the country and you find many things in common, like a storage area for supplies and parts. Since this is typically viewed as a non-production area, we tend to ignore it.

With a kaizen approach, we need to improve all areas of our company, including spare parts. With a good TPM program, we should develop standard processes that establish the method to determine what parts to keep on hand.

First, a team-based approach is best used to identify the critical parts that we may need. We can use the recommended spare parts list by the manufacturer, but only as a starting point. Many times, this list of parts can include more parts than we should keep. Look at the machine history but also take care not to include a part just because we got burned back in 1982 when it broke down for six months.

As a guideline, critical parts can be identified as “recent chronic problem areas” and “difficult to obtain within 24 to 48 hours”. Cost should NOT be a factor. If the chance of a problem is high and we are left waiting days or weeks for the parts to come in, it’s better to keep these parts on hand no matter what the cost of the part is. Compare it to lost business, customer disappointments, etc., to factor in the decision. Discuss this with your team and company management to determine what makes the best sense in your situation.

Once we have a plan, set up a spare parts list for each piece of equipment and clearly identify the parts in the stock area.

As all things in lean, this is not a static process; it’s dynamic. The spare parts list needs to be reviewed on a regular basis – perhaps once a year. Machines fall out of warranty or the manufacturer no longer supports this model in either service or parts.

Without a standard process for our spare parts, we may find parts on the shelves like those in the picture above.

About the author:
Mike Wroblewski started his lean journey with instruction in quick die change from Shigeo Shingo. Mike is currently a senior operations consultant for Gemba Consulting North America LLC. He also writes a blog called “Got Boondoggle?” featuring lean and Six Sigma topics

Marshall Institute president Greg Folts discusses the five key elements of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). All five elements must be in place for an organization to achieve the full potential of TPM and maintenance excellence.

Maintenance's role in organizational performance is finally being realized. The efficiency of a facilities operation is largely dependant on the effectiveness of its maintenance program. TPM is a proven initiative - driven by both maintenance and operations - that can significantly increase equipment reliability and uptime while reducing unnecessary costs. The end result is a large impact of the company's bottom line.

Marshall Institute provides this presentation on the key principles for Total Productive Maintenance and Total Process Reliability. You can find additional information from Marshall Institute at www.marshallinstitute.com.