of the coin.
When the blanks came out on the conveyer belt, any that were standing up were knocked over by the edge of the new cardboard chute. The blanks no longer fell off the belt onto the floor. The number of blanks that fell off dropped to 1 or 2 a shift. The savings was in the thousands of dollars. The impact on maintenance was that the maintenance effort was divided up among more shippable units. An hour a day cleaning up the blanks was also saved.
You have to have an idea where to start to look for Fat. This book will spend several chapters on this issue of where to look. A certain kind of vision is needed that allows you to walk into your plant or any plant and get the tempo of the place.
Look around and see the cleanliness of a “5S” shop (to be discussed in its own chapter). If everything is really tidy you can immediately see problem areas. You can tell when a place is well organized or not well organized, when there’s debris under the tables or not. You can see that kind of waste. That is the obvious stuff. There is also wasted effort, time, wasted energy, wasted spares, etc. that you can’t easily see.
Not every organization should undertake an effort of this type.
This is a tough conversation. If a company is driven by short-term goals exclusively, then Lean Maintenance programs might not be appropriate. It is almost as if the profit-making corporation is designed to be intrinsically against good long-term maintenance practices.
We are not talking about greed here. But we are talking about having a game called business, where one of the rules is to look at the profit numbers for each short interval. If we look only at short term economics, the Future Value (FV) of the maintenance effort discounted to today, never seems to equal the Present Value (PV) of the investment.
This is a pure devil’s advocate position. But keep in mind that this view is held by many smart people. In a later chapter we will discuss the leaks in the pipeline in Alaska. As an example, place the savings over 30 years by not doing all the maintenance necessary to avoid the leaks on one side of the equation. On the other side, place the costs to fix the leaks 30 years later. If you do the math, small amounts of money saved over 30 years (this is a mortgage payment type of problem) can justify huge spending on leaks now. Of course these money calculations ignore the impact on the environment, but that impact is not built into the structure of the typical corporation. We have to fight that position with all the tools available. But if the company is dedicated to only short term gains, we may lose the argument.
Given all the kudos given to Lean maintenance it might be a surprise to know it is not always a good idea. Lean Maintenance can be a demotivator unless there are several things that are committed to and present. Some of the attitudes needed for success are:
1.Commitment that efficiencies gained will not result in layoffs.
2.Commitment to follow through on at least 50% or more of the projects if the engineering and economics work (the more projects you follow through on the better). The president of Sony, in its heyday, spent a good deal of effort following through on ideas from employees, even those of marginal value. He said that every project done was a motivator to the entire workforce and was well worth it, even if it in itself didn’t make money.
3.Ability to commit the resources to the effort, including time off from regular duties to work on projects, small amounts of money to purchase experimental materials, and management/staff coaching time.
4.Ability to allow flexibility in purchasing non-standard items from new vendors on a rush basis.
5.Ability to allow people to cross functional and trade lines, and to encourage workers to talk directly to the appropriate experts in the accounting, purchasing, legal, and engineering departments.
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CHAPTER 1 |
Distinguishing Lean from Everything Else
Benjamin Franklin says: Time is money.
Lean Maintenance is mistaken for a whole host of other efforts. In this section we will distinguish Lean Maintenance from some of the other programs that are occasionally called Lean. We will also show how some efforts in the past were really predecessors to Lean Maintenance.
But first we will discuss a program that is Lean. Kaizen is part of Lean. Kaizen is a Japanese word denoting a philosophy of continual improvement. There are two types of Kaizen that apply to Lean Maintenance; Flow Kaizen-value stream improvement, Point Kaizen-Waste elimination. Kaizen events are short term Lean efforts, where teams blitz a shop and make many improvements at the same time. The event is generally organized around a subject. A good source of information on Kaizen is the Lean Manufacturing Pocket Handbook mentioned in the bibliography.
Beware of phantom savings
What would be a good waste reduction project? If we want to be lean, we want to reduce the waste, what would constitute a good project? A good project reduces waste that is obvious. The project should save money directly. Now, there’s a huge problem here, with projects that save time (labor). If we are saving (just) labor hours, we grapple with something called phantom savings.
Phantom savings drives accountants nuts; in fact it drives everyone who thinks deeply about it nuts, because phantom savings is not traceable to the companies’ financial books. For instance, let’s say we save 10 minutes in a meeting by better meeting etiquette or by more discipline during the meeting, and there are five people in the meeting, we pick up 50 minutes a day. Where does that savings show up on the books?
The only place that such a savings could conceivably show up is if somebody is fired. So that labor savings becomes a phantom savings, unless the time that’s saved can be used on something else that will reduce costs of operation. So you have to just be careful when you’re doing these kinds of things. A lot of people might say “Oh, we saved so many hours.” And then an accountant might say, “Great, by the way, who is leaving?” They saved half a maintenance welder. So which half of him is going to go? Remember, we already promised that no one goes as a result of the efficiencies from Lean Maintenance projects.
When we’re deciding on which projects to do first, we should pick projects with bookable savings. Either we want to have our output (production) go up or our input (materials, energy, labor or overhead) go down, in a measurable way.
If you use contractors for labor you have a great opportunity. Saving contractor hours is a bookable savings (because you can send them home without severance pay). If the plant went from six contractors to five contractors, that’s savings that is somewhere on the books.
There are real cost savings and there are phantom savings. Real cost savings flow to the accounting system and appear on the books. Phantom savings appear on reports and can never be tracked to the accounting books.
Some examples of Real savings (Note that not all real savings appear on the maintenance budget. Some are below the so-called water line and accrue to other departments)
Reductions in payroll (personnel)
Non-replacement of personnel lost through attrition because we don’t need them anymore
Reduction
