How do you implement lean maintenance for your business? That’s a good question. The reason why so few companies have implemented it is that they are expecting it to be easier than it is. If you think the answer is “there’s nothing easy about it,” then you’re right!
This post will break down lean maintenance, how to apply this maintenance management in your organization, and some key elements that will help with implementation.
What Is Lean Maintenance?
Business success depends on effective maintenance management. The lean maintenance approach combines lean goals and concepts with physical asset management.
Lean maintenance is a reliability maintenance methodology that focuses on reducing waste and improving efficiency. It is based on the principles of lean manufacturing, which is a system for streamlining production processes.
Lean maintenance seeks to identify and eliminate sources of waste in the reliability maintenance process, such as overproduction, waiting time, defects, inventory, and transportation. By removing these wastes from the process, lean maintenance helps organizations reduce costs while improving quality and reliability.
Why Should You Apply Lean Principles to Maintenance?
Lean maintenance techniques have the potential to improve vital manufacturing aspects in a major way. Machines will inevitably break down without proper maintenance, disrupting your maintenance schedules and shortening the life of your equipment.
Lean maintenance allows you to perform more (effective) maintenance with fewer resources. Despite staffing problems, maintenance departments can still provide better equipment availability and reliability.
The implementation of lean maintenance forces you to identify and eliminate inefficient processes, improve inefficient processes, and speed up your emergency maintenance response.
Setting Up a Lean Maintenance Workflow
Setting up a lean maintenance workflow requires careful planning and the tools to complete all maintenance activities effectively. With the right tools, it can streamline processes, reduce costs, and increase productivity.
You can set up your lean maintenance process using the process below.
1. Create a Team In Your Maintenance Management System
It would help if you first established a maintenance team. As they will clearly understand what has gone wrong with each asset, you will require team members that have worked on the specific assets you will be managing. The group could be made up of machine operators or maintenance technicians.
2. Pick a Good Leader
The next thing to do is to select a leader to plan and schedule maintenance management tasks. This person should be an effective leader with excellent organizational abilities and a broad understanding of how each machine should run.
3. Select Management Systems
There are several stages to implementing lean maintenance, and it is often best to start with one system. Choose the one that requires the most assistance—probably the one that increases maintenance expenses or production downtime—and start there. You will be better equipped to apply lean maintenance techniques to other systems as you gain experience.
In an ideal world, you would eventually expand to all of your facility’s systems, reducing maintenance costs throughout your business.
Lean Maintenance Schedule
Once you’ve assembled a team, a leader, and a system, you can start identifying the tasks needed and scheduling the most efficient times to execute them.
Time-centered scheduling will be used as part of a preventive maintenance reliability program. When condition monitoring is installed in your system, the timing of maintenance tasks may be influenced by Predictive Maintenance (PdM) alerts generated by your CMMS.
Work in Cycles
In maintenance management, lean maintenance entails repeated operations. Your team may experience frequent workload increases if you are not vigilant.
Work in cycles with your employees to make sure that they cover all systems and keep workloads tolerable at all times. This is especially important if you need to take care of an amount of equipment or several systems.
Make a Maintenance Audit
A maintenance audit is required for every organization that wants to implement a lean maintenance workflow. It is a vital tool for assuring equipment reliability and improving productivity.
The audit process begins by recognizing and comprehending the present state of maintenance operations, followed by establishing what needs to be done to attain the desired results. The audit should consider all system components, such as preventative and corrective maintenance, spare parts management, and so on.
What Benefits Does Lean Maintenance Offer?
Maintenance management in your lean maintenance strategy is essential for attaining these benefits. A strong maintenance management system assists businesses in correctly maintaining their equipment, boosting the reliability of their operations, and reducing breakdowns.
Manufacturers should employ a lean maintenance approach for a variety of reasons, including:
Product Quality Improvement
With lean maintenance, you can reduce waste and production downtime, increase productivity, minimize errors, and maximize efficiency. It helps boost the product’s quality by reducing waste and variation sources. This leads to a more consistent product, fewer errors, and less rework.
Reduced Lead Times
Manufacturers constantly look for ways to shorten lead times and boost productivity in today’s fast-paced industry. In all facets of the production process, lean maintenance assists in locating and eliminating waste. This covers everything, from scheduling and planning the production to maintaining and repairing the equipment. By optimizing these operations, manufacturers can significantly cut lead times and increase overall efficiency.
Lower Costs
Lean maintenance is a philosophy that promotes the removal of waste in all aspects of the manufacturing process. Manufacturers can drastically lower their annual expenditures by implementing lean maintenance strategies.
Lean maintenance can also help free up valuable floor space and minimize inventory levels. Lean maintenance offers manufacturers significant cost savings by lowering waste and boosting efficiency.
Enhanced Safety
Lean maintenance increases the effectiveness of the production process by locating and removing waste. Ensuring that the equipment is adequately maintained and serviced serves to improve safety. Decreasing the time workers are exposed to risky conditions helps reduce accidents and injuries. Identifying and removing waste can also streamline the process and reduce the possibility of accidents and errors.
Conclusion
Lean maintenance is meant to take place only once and then be done. It is a continuous process that requires that you look for ways to eliminate waste from your business operations. When working with a lean maintenance program, it’s important to remember that no method will work for all types of businesses.
Lean maintenance is unique to the industry you’re in, your company goals, the size of your business, and how it operates. Every business can benefit from the lean maintenance process and methodology, but how you implement it will vary significantly based on these factors.
