GETTING FOCUSED FOR SUCCESS
By Kirk Workinger, Reliability Solutions, Inc.

Are you responsible for the maintenance organization at your operation? Is your organization asking you to reduce maintenance costs, increase uptime, reduce the spare parts inventory and support the move to lean manufacturing?  I have been there and to meet these goals you must get organized. 

To begin the process you must look at how you are doing maintenance. Are you doing the same things over and over again expecting different results? Do you and your organization know what needs to be done to increase uptime better than the rest of the organization? The first step in the organization process is recognizing the need to understand how successful maintenance organizations do maintenance.

While working at Whirlpool we used a cross-functional group to analyze how well our maintenance group met the needs of our organization. They looked at the elements that makeup a “World Class Maintenance Organization”. They looked at planning and organizing maintenance work, preventive and predictive maintenance, and how well the maintenance group partners with the rest of the organization. This team developed and promoted a vision of “Zero Unplanned Downtime” which was a significant change in culture from the past. This team also identified the tools that would be required to achieve this vision.

A key learning of this group was that maintenance could not make dramatic changes alone. Success would require a partnership with production personnel to eliminate all of the operating losses, not just equipment downtime. Maintenance had to change the way we did business and work with production as a partner. How could we do this? We brought in a group to deliver a “World Class Maintenance” workshop. All manufacturing managers and most maintenance management personnel attended the workshop. This helped to build the common understanding that:  “We are all responsible for eliminating losses on our equipment.”

The partnership that was needed between Maintenance and Manufacturing required credibility and support from the manufacturing managers. Due to the extremely competitive nature of the business, convincing manufacturing manager’s to buy-in to these initiatives, the team had to provide them with a business case that laid out the potential performance benefits and time commitments for their personnel.

In addition to this maintenance initiative, there were other manufacturing initiatives being considered including: quick changeover, Six Sigma, and lean manufacturing. The management team recognized that all of these potentially beneficial programs would require participation and buy-in from the same people. There was some risk that these would become competing initiatives and the focus would move from improving throughput without capital to “get my program in instead of the others.”

In an effort to keep this from happening all the initiatives were organized under one process called Maximized Manufacturing. The focus of maximized manufacturing is aligning the different improvement initiatives into a single effort that focuses on both improving efficiency and maximizing throughput. We also organized a steering committee to guide the implementation process. We wanted to make sure that this did not become another program of the month. The main responsibility of the steering committee was to assure that all the implementations could be supported by maintenance, engineering and manufacturing. Processes that do not get the correct support fail.

The backbone of the Maximized Manufacturing process is the TPM activities and infrastructure. Total Productive Manufacturing (sometimes called Total Productive Maintenance) is a team-based approach to maintaining the condition of equipment.  It relies heavily on operator ownership of equipment, continuous identification and implementation of improvements, and the development of planned maintenance. 

At Findlay, TPM also provides the structure necessary to sustain continuous improvement activities, by defining the leadership of the organization and their responsibilities.  The TPM organization also creates a system of accountability that is required to keep the teams focused and moving forward. And finally, TPM promotes the ownership of equipment by the people who are closest to it, the operators and maintainers.

  The real action of Maximized Manufacturing is focused on a machine center where Critical Process Yield or CPY can be measured and a goal set.  The team is made up of the area operators and maintenance personnel across the various shifts and is typically led by a process engineer or an area supervisor who is the official TPM coordinator for the area.  The team starts by attending a four-hour workshop to learn the basics of TPM and how to measure CPY.  The team then conducts follow up brainstorming sessions on each shift to identify the sources of loss in their area.  There is no focus on solutions at this point just the sources of loss.  To identify the losses in these sessions, the team uses downtime notes, operator sheets for the last year and the experience and intuition of the workers.

  The team then begins to look for and implement solutions to eliminate the sources of loss identified.  One tool that they use is the TPM checklist that contains standard actions to eliminate many of the losses.  These core TPM activities like clean-to-inspect are now done in the context of the losses identified so that the people doing the cleaning understand the purpose.  Implementing the checklist also means that some of the routine maintenance tasks are transferred to operations, which helps build their ownership and helps ensure that defects are detected and dealt with earlier.

At the start of this effort, the Division needed a way to gauge their current performance and set targets for improvement.  They adopted a measure called Critical Process Yield (CPY).  CPY was Findlay’s version of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), which is often used in TPM implementations.  Unlike other measures, CPY accounts for all sources of loss.  It starts with a baseline of maximum theoretical production rate and then all the sources of loss are calculated and deducted to give the percent of theoretical maximum.  At a high level, the sources of loss include availability, performance and quality (see Figure 3 for a detailed listing of sources of loss).  CPY is expressed as a percent of theoretical capacity so the lower the CPY the greater the opportunity.  At Findlay CPY was tracked on a machine center basis and it indicated that the opportunity for improvement was quite high. 

In several areas, assets were only producing at 60-70% of their capability.  Benchmarks indicated that 85-90% was possible.  While this level of opportunity was exciting, it was met with a good deal of skepticism.  Many of the workers in the area did not believe that major improvement without additional capital was possible and based on the results of previous improvement initiatives, they were very wary of getting involved.

To reduce this skepticism we looked at previous attempts to implement new processes. The main reason for failure was lack of support and understanding of the process. This is one reason we developed the steering committee I mentioned earlier. This group developed and delivered the initial training. This demonstrated the commitment, support and understanding for this process.

So to sum it up get focused. Develop the Vision. Develop a partnership. Combine like initiatives. Identify a major improvement process. Measure your progress. Look for continuous improvement.