When it all breaks down

Howdy folks, here I am once again on another aircraft flying to work teaching and implementing Lean on the front lines.  Tonight's posting will be about something we know all too well.  When multiple pieces of equipment break down, and what do we do to prevent this from happening.

Preventative Maintenance, PM as we will now call it, in some organizations is absent.  The PM records, how many hits a punch and die can take before dressing the tool is needed, changing the oil in presses and press brakes, forklift PM, tooling PM on press breaks, basic service to the Lasers, overall PM not only of the equipment but the processes also.

Yeah buddy, that was painted with a broad brush stroke.  We have covered a lot of ground with that paragraph.  Yet, what are we doing as Lean leaders and implementers to help bring PM into the game.  This week my teams took some major hits with equipment that should have been PM'd.  The teams and I understood what was happening and why, and we had to devise a plan to sell PM to the suits.  Sometimes those who sit in an office all day don't see the value of spending money on equipment that isn't broken, yet will spend tens of thousands of dollars in expedited shipping costs that actually are more expensive than the parts needed.

What we did was use this as a baseline, a baseline of what you may ask.  Well cowpokes, when something breaks that sends a piece of equipment to boothill, we want to know the date/time and tech who replaced it.  With this we can start collecting data on service life of parts.  This will also allow your maintenance department to understand which parts to keep on hand and a qty. because the team is harvesting the data to pass off to the accounting folks, who then can become allies when you justify keeping spare parts on hand because..... when you are failing to produce customer orders on time deliver starts to look a lot like habitual overtime.  We all know from a previous blog entry that habitual overtime leads to burnout and lowered productivity.

Doing a regimented PM program isn't easy, I know as I've been trying to sell it to those who write the checks and get our PO #'s.  This is where the salesmanship coupled with data is paying off.  When your team starts to engage individuals on the senior team about not giving them what they need to produce a quality product in a timely fashion, they are holding the senior team accountable.  This is when silos are broken, and a true dialog is started.  Front line guys describing the problem, engineering harvesting data and scoping the true root cause, senior team writing the checks to make sure the mission is carried out, and me well I'm orchestrating it all teaching and living Lean principles along the way.  Yes this cowboy made is sound very simplistic and I've left out some steps, but you get the gist of what I'm saying.

I'd like to thank everyone who stops by to read my blog and watch what I'm doing with this organization.  It is a learning experience every day, both for me and my teams.  Yoda and I have been doing some rearranging in my office with a paint scheme and that in and of itself is an exercise in Lean as we don't want rework, we are doing the legwork and constructing the vision before we buy any of the paint.  It is going to be a grand project and I may post some pics of it along the way.  Remember folks always listen to the people doing the work as they are a highly underutilized resource that can help solve many issues.

Thank you once again for stopping around the campfire

Cowboy