There is a margin to improvement in every activity. Having a third eye view or another unbiased opinion can serve to highlight advantage points opportunities. Asking the right question or questioning the basics reveals some hindsight situations early enough to anticipate the probability of their occurrence …….
It can start as early as the design stage or can be revisited years after operation. Within time performance drifts. Comfortable zones are created. New ideas are labelled “Not for us” or “Not possible to implement” Painful failure repair activities that cost the facility time, effort, quality together with their subsidiaries of overtime, rework and unsafe situations are the new norms.
Refreshing the team by training, new tactics, new tools or even just new recording and analyzing techniques will impose a new start that will result in value added benefits that shall be reflected on the direct or indirect cost.
Decreasing the maintenance cost, decreasing the waste due to rework, increasing the uptime, posting the production, and many other gains are positively reflected on the competitive of the organization.
How to know if your maintenance is performing as it should be?
Ask The following Questions:
- Do we have a maintenance program or we are just repairing it when it fails?
- Do we have a list of all the assets or simply equipment?
- What is the source of this list?
- What is the source of the maintenance instructions?
- Do we have equipment maintenance manuals? Do we read them?
- Are the equipment grouped by type or ny area?
- Do we record the repair or maintenance activities?
- What data we record?
- Are the records useful for some statisticl analysis as Mean Time To Failure?
- Can these records help us in recording the real cost of the equipment?
- How we manage our stores? Are we under stocking or over stocking?
- Is maintenance an added value activity?
