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| TOTAL
PRODUCTIVE MAINTENANCE CASE STUDY |
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MRC Bearings' TPM
Journey: From Totally Painted Machines to Taking Pride in Our
Machines
In 1996 MRC Bearings, a
unionized aerospace industry supplier, recognized it had a
problem. They were behind on their orders. Their customers
were pushing for shorter lead times and cost reductions.
Approximately eighty percent of their maintenance hours were
dedicated to emergency work orders. In October of 1997 over
one thousand, six hundred and sixty hours were consumed by
unplanned maintenance in just one area. Ten months later that
number fell to less than thirty hours. That's over a 99%
decrease.
In another area they were able to achieve almost a 98%
decrease in the number of unplanned maintenance hours in an
eight-month period. Greg Folts, Manager of Continuous
Improvement at MRC attributes their remarkable success to
having a hardworking, dedicated maintenance team and
implementing a Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) program.
"We started slow, beginning with a small area that was
critical to our process but was experiencing chronic
problems," said Folts. "At first, a lot of people
were skeptical and not really interested in getting involved
with TPM," he said. "We had a core of people who
were excited about TPM and we enlisted the help of people
outside of our organization to work with us," Folts said.
MRC worked with Preston Ingalls, President of Marshall
Institute, to organize their TPM efforts. He continued,
"Preston helped us get started, but he was also our best
cheerleader. He got our folks fired up about TPM." One of
MRC's customers, Pratt-Whitney, also supported their efforts
by facilitating MRC's first TPM event and sharing their TPM
practices with MRC..
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