Businesses often have to decide whether to spend money on preventative maintenance and repairs or not. Most business owners are adamant when it comes to maintenance and repairs. Yet, repairs can be costly, so putting off preventive maintenance is a bad idea.
So what should we do? Nowadays, there are various options for firms that wish to keep their expenses low without sacrificing the quality of their machinery. One such method is called “lean maintenance.” It involves workers and supervisors who are teaming together to determine what machinery and systems are the most important to the business, then taking preventative measures to avoid breakdowns.
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What is Lean Maintenance?
Maintenance is an integral part of lean manufacturing. Lean maintenance is a method that aims to make the most efficient use of available resources when repairing and maintaining buildings, machines, and other machinery. It entails making use of resources that can lower prices of products while raising the quality.
In addition, lean maintenance seeks to minimize all forms of waste, including stockpiling, production, rework, waiting, transit, motion, processing, and underutilization of personnel.
Reliability maintenance is a critical component of lean manufacturing and lean operations. Lean manufacturing requires all processes to be smooth and efficient, without unnecessary waste. Reliability maintenance can identify and fix parts that are most likely to break down or cause problems to production and operation.
Lean manufacturing focuses on eliminating waste while increasing productivity and customer satisfaction. Maintenance management improves quality and reduces downtime, boosting productivity and customer happiness.
Lean Maintenance Principles
Here are some of the fundamental principles of lean maintenance:
Value: Lean maintenance focuses on providing value to the customers by reducing costs while increasing quality and reliability.
Eliminate Waste: This includes unnecessary inventory, defects, overproduction, transportation, waiting, and motion. Production workers should strive for perfection or zero defects at every point in the value stream.
Standardized Work: Standard work instructions should include all steps necessary to complete an activity or task correctly and efficiently without deviation or shortcuts. These work instructions can be used to train employees to know exactly what needs to be done when performing their daily jobs.
Metrics for Evaluating the Impact of a Lean Maintenance Program
1. Hours of Scheduled Downtime
The total number of hours of unscheduled downtime per month is a crucial metric for determining the effectiveness of maintenance management using a lean approach. This metric is captured when a device is unavailable due to unforeseen circumstances.
Breakdowns, repairs, and other disruptions are examples of unplanned events. Less downtime can mean lower costs and overhead. If this metric decreases over time, this means you’re working more effectively and efficiently with fewer resources, and that’s what a lean maintenance program should do.
2. Cost of Unscheduled Downtime
This is the cost of all production losses due to equipment failure and the labor costs needed to resume production after an outage. Unplanned downtime is often calculated by multiplying the total number of hours lost to the average hourly wage of each employee involved in the production plus the additional costs associated with overtime and other expenses incurred during the interruption.
3. Planning and Scheduling Labor Costs
Labor costs are an important metric to track when evaluating the impact of lean maintenance program. When production is halted, the downtime can be costly. Aside from lost revenue, there are additional costs spent on overtime, training, and replacement of workers. Downtime not only raises the risk of injury to customers who are waiting for the service to resume, but it also raises the risk of injury to employees.
4. Material Costs for Testing, Maintenance, and Repairs
This metric can be measured by tracking monthly testing, maintenance, and repair costs and comparing them to the expenses incurred the previous year. This lets you compare your company’s testing, maintenance management, and repair expenses to the previous year and see if it’s increased or dropped.
The lower the metric is, the better for your business, as you will spend less on replacement parts than with a lean maintenance program.
Benefits of Applying Lean Principles to Maintenance Management
1. Increased Productivity
Lean manufacturing focuses on how people can work better together to reach their goals. A lean approach to maintenance management helps people understand their roles and responsibilities better and work together more effectively.
2. Improved Customer Satisfaction
Using the principles of “Lean,” businesses try to improve their efficiency and make their customers happier. Customers are more satisfied and are more likely to buy from the company again if they have good maintenance management, and their needs are considered when making the products.
3. Improved Quality
Standardized work is used in lean maintenance so that every step of the process is done the same way all the time. This improves the quality because they all undergo the same process. If something goes wrong with one unit, they need to be recalled since it’s likely that all units included in that batch have issues or defects.
4. Reduced Costs
Lean manufacturing aims to cut production expenses by cutting down on unnecessary inventory, scrap, or rework. Similarly, more effective maintenance minimizes downtime and waste production.
5. Eliminate Business Process Waste
The principles of lean business aid in the reduction of unnecessary steps and activities. Waste is defined as anything that does not directly benefit your customers. There may be extraneous actions, components that don’t function as expected, or even waiting times for parts. By cutting back on these inefficiencies, your company will run smoother and generate more money.
6. Prevent Errors From Occurring
For lean to work effectively, everything you do must be done the same way every time. This is because the primary goal of lean is to reduce waste while increasing productivity. So, whether it’s cleaning a machine or making something, there needs to be a clear set of steps that everyone should always follow.
Wrapping Up
Lean maintenance is becoming more and more critical in the business world nowadays. Businesses have become more aware of how bad things can be if they take maintenance management for granted. This is especially true when it comes to maintaining production equipment and machinery. The longer it takes to fix or replace a part of equipment, the less work it can do. Hence, there will be less money that a business can make from its operations.
Improving an organization’s efficiency through lean maintenance is becoming a popular practice. It necessitates applying top-tier resources and the most effective strategies for mending and maintaining machinery. Lean maintenance is crucial if you want your company to cut costs on resources and labor.