gear (cranes, Broderson, etc) break down too often. Mobile equipment takes too long to get back from the garage.
•The biggest waste is sharing large equipment. When ever a mobile crane is needed it seems like someone else has it. It then becomes necessary to steal one from another unit.
•Craftspeople do not get ready to use the crane when they order it (because they know they will not get it right away anyway. When they do get it they might even hide it).
•The issue of cross training of the General Mechanics (GMs). There is a wide variation in skill sets among the GMs. Some can weld plate but not pipe, some can align pumps. These deficiencies cripple the crews, create inefficiency and put a lot of pressure on the GMs with more skills.
•A huge amount of time is wasted in re-inventing the wheel. We have a 50-year old plant, yet we have to invent ways of doing things that have been done successfully before.
•Only patching and not fixing the root cause of the problem due to cost, budget or production concerns wastes a lot of time.
•Poor PMs (not well-directed, personnel skills, often not equal to the task).
•Inflexible break and meal times.
•The Work Requested is incorrectly scoped or defined, leading to the wrong job being done.
•Lack of coherent priorities means workers are pulled off scheduled jobs to work on emergencies, which causes lost time and interferes with the timely completion of PMs (which in turn causes more emergencies). Jobs sometimes come up that are called emergencies but they are not really emergencies.
•Excessive emergencies interrupt scheduled work. Maintenance seldom seems to have a chance to finish what is started in one go.
•Too many managers and not enough workers to do the work. On a valve change, too many supervisors standing around trying to rush the job.
•Supervisors have no idea whether the job is ready.
•Problems with scaffolding. Only contracting for two crews to cover the entire plant so that maintenance frequently has to wait excessive amounts of time. Using a contractor is often a waste of money and causes more problems than it solves.
It might be apparent that some of these items describe waste that is easily accessible or “low hanging fruit” and some items require significant change. As the processes for Lean Maintenance projects are described, you can revisit this list and see even more project opportunities.
Lean Maintenance projects are fun!
The truth is Lean Maintenance is fun. These investigations and projects are going to be the fun stuff, and are the part of maintenance that, if any of you have ever come up through the maintenance ranks, are maintenance engineers, or have hands-on experience designing stuff; this may be the most fun part of what you do.
You’ll soon start to see some of the things we’re going to address. The exercises in this work can be done with the people in the crafts. This work has been done in a wide range of organizations with a very wide variety of participants.
In a school (described in detail in a later chapter), we worked with the groundskeepers, who didn’t understand English. I would give instructions and then one of them would translate it for everyone at the table. And the workers would do these projects, and you could feel the energy. So even though fun is against the grain in maintenance circles, we’re going to shoot for that as part of these projects.
Sometimes the negative result is positive
The groundskeepers I just mentioned did a project on edging blades. They felt that a more-expensive edging blade would be Leaner (cheaper per foot of edging and less effort to use). So we bought the expensive cutting blade, but it turned out that their old cheap blade performed about the same as the expensive blade. To compound the problem the cheap one could be sharpened but the expensive one had special steel alloys and a shape that couldn’t be sharpened. So it was clearly Leaner and cheaper to use the cheaper blade.
The team felt really bad. They felt bad because their project had failed. I said that I considered it to be a completely successful project, because it gave us information about the process or product that we didn’t have before, and we now had a new basis for thinking about things. People were much more conscious of the whole blade issue after that than they were before. So, a good project might be successful even if it has a negative result. The next time a new blade comes out, they can give it a try and test it against their benchmark.
What does waste look like?
Is it non-added value? Actually, that’s what waste doesn’t look like. What does waste look like? This is not a high-level question; I’m asking a kindergarten question here. Waste looks like garbage, a spill on the floor, extra parts in the scrap bins, personnel standing around.
When you take on Lean you get sensitivity to what waste looks like. You can walk into your place and see waste when you couldn’t see it before. Once you start to think this way, you walk through the storeroom and when the dust is really thick on something you start to think of questions. Is the part there for a really good reason (I don’t want to minimize that in the maintenance world)?
It may be what we call an insurance-policy spare, which you expressly have on the shelf to not use. But there’s stuff in the stock room that you won’t use, which is different from “not use”.
In the stock room at a large coal-fired power plant they had this large part, it looked like the head of a cylinder. It was covered with a thick coat of grease and dust (so it had been there a while). I asked, “What is that?” The stock room manager answered “Well, I don’t really know what it is. And neither do any of my people. And, in fact, I invited the old maintenance guys in here that would have been around when this was used before, and they don’t know what it is either.” Now that will qualify to me as some kind of waste, although we don’t know what kind of waste because we don’t know what it is. And, of course, what everybody is afraid of is making a mistake and getting rid of it (and finding it is needed the next day).
An automated assembly operation had a $25,000 power supply for a robot that was never supposed to break. The company bought it because it had a six months lead time. We call that an insurance policy part. It’s a well-established strategy that there are certain things that are so onerous to not have, that you have them. These parts are not waste. The question is, what about everything else? What about the SKU (stock keeping unit—single part number) that is not an insurance policy spare. That’s what we want to attack.
Once we start to eliminate waste we start to see what waste looks like. Consider the US Mint. They blank out 11 coins at a time—quarters in this instance. The job is run on a 200-stroke per minute Shuler press. The blanks are cut from the clad metal coil like cookies being cut by a cookie cutter. The blanks (round disks before they are coins) pass through the press and fall on to a conveyer belt. The belt takes the blanks to the coining operation.
US Coins are blanked and coined in separate operations. Under the Shuler press there’s a big pile of blanks on the floor. Every blank on the floor cost the Mint $0.06–0.07.The manager said, “Well, what happens is, the blanks hit the conveyer belt and a few roll off.” We decided to modify the chute underneath the press to better control the blanks falling on to the conveyer belt. To test the idea we designed an extension to the chute with cardboard and duct tape. We cut up a cardboard box and wrapped it around the chute so that
