February, 2011

By Douglas C. Wood

Is maintenance strategic? When you make long range plans, is capacity maintenance included in planning, or is it taken as ‘given’? Capacity is more than hard machinery; it is having all machines able to run at full capacity when you need them, and that takes skill, labor, and preparation.

Of course, one of the first areas to be cut in troubled times is maintenance, often right after training. This is also one of the areas where it is hard to keep the required skills current. As your employees age, knowledge needs to be spread to the younger members of the workforce.

Major expenses

Maintenance costs big money, and poor maintenance costs more. These costs extend well beyond millwright staff expense; say two skilled mechanics ($60,000 a year for each) compared to losing a job due to a 10% shortfall in capacity that cost you $1,000,000 in revenue. At the very least, 10% downtime on a staff of 50 can add at least $175,000 in wasted wages. To add insult to injury, machines not performing well may cost an added 10% in material scrap and turn out product that makes customers cringe.

You need to always have full capacity ready when you need it: if machine uptime is not predictable, if process capability is not sustained, we cannot satisfy the customer, and we cannot stay in business.

Main steps to Total Productive Maintenance (TPM):

At a high level, putting TPM into practice has four facets:

• Cleaning equipment so problems can be found (asset preservation)
• Preventive maintenance for the life of the equipment (return on investment)
• Regular maintenance by machine operators (‘catch it early’ opportunity)
• Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), a comprehensive metric of equipment (keeping focus)

TPM has three metrics that are commonplace: Availability, Performance efficiency, and Quality. It is how these are measured that makes TPM different. Availability is the fraction of time that machines are available to make parts when scheduled; Performance Efficiency is the actual cycle time divided by the ideal cycle time; and The quality rate is minutes making good parts over minutes making all parts. When you multiply these three ratios together, you get OEE, a global measure of the process capacity as a whole. Such a metric helps to focus everyone on the goal- full capacity ready when you need it.

How to learn more

We offer a two hour webinar on Total Productive Maintenance including an exercise and reporting template. You can find this instructor-led internet course here: DC Wood Course Registrations You may contact us for more information:

mail: click here
Address: 13817 Bradshaw Suite B, Overland Park, KS 66221
Phone: (913) 669-4173
Fax: (913) 273-1611
http://www.dcwoodconsulting.com/