July 03, 2008
Lean, TPM & Six Sigma Tip
When Lean removes excess inventories without first understanding what the WIP or “safety reserves” where protecting, then the manufacturing process becomes unstable.
When companies blitz a manufacturing cell to identify sources of defects and flood the maintenance system with numerous work orders, the maintenance process becomes unstable.
These are just a couple of examples of instability during the implementation of Lean or TPM. So, why does instability still exist?
From my experience, having worked within many organizations throughout the world, instability exists because:
• Lean and TPM are not geared towards resolving equipment reliability problems, nor are they focused on improving the maintainability of plant equipment.
• Lean focuses on making the production process more efficient through the elimination of waste, but rarely focuses on why the waste is there in the first place, which is because of variation, variation in how the equipment is operated and maintained.
• Neither Lean nor TPM focus on improving those business processes that define the standards of how the equipment should be operated and maintained.
• Lean and TPM are both designed for continuous improvement and assume that a rigorous culture of discipline and standardization already exists.
To build a foundation of reliability you must start with Proactive Maintenance and create an ability within your organization to effectively maintain manufacturing equipment.
Once proactive maintenance is in place, then you can more readily identify opportunities to improve efficiency through Operator Care programs and loss elimination practices.
Too often instability comes from being too aggressive in your improvement process, attempting to make the leap towards optimal performance without a firm understanding of the basics, the basics of work control, materials management, preventive/predictive maintenance, and reliability-based engineering.
Slow down, understand that your organizations ability to improve is directly proportionate to the maturity of your organization.
Develop an improvement process that
1) creates effective practices
2) builds efficiency within those practices, and
3) optimizes overall performance through continuous improvement
Tip provided by
Darrin Wikoff, CMRP
Life Cycle Engineering
Tel: +1 843.744.7110
iPresentation Invitation: Building the Reliability Foundation for Lean, TPM & Six Sigma
