Wasted Maintenance Material, Motion and Time, Drastically Affect YOUR Bottom-Line. 

Waste drove Henry Ford crazy! The famous automobile-manufacturing pioneer made a notable effort to eradicate waste within his organization.

Sources of Waste: To become effective at identifying sources of waste, it is useful to fully understand the seven forms of waste that exist in the maintenance operation:

1. Overproduction
2. Waiting
3. Transportation
4. Process Waste
5. Inventory
6. Motion
7. Defects

1. OVERPRODUCTION:

Overproduction is a key waste observed in manufacturing facilities.

In maintenance practices, this waste often appears because preventive and predictive maintenance tasks are performed at intervals more often than is optimal. Unnecessary predictive maintenance procedures are 100 percent wasteful!

Everyone has heard a story of a bearing that failed due to lack of lubrication and caused an entire process to shut down unexpectedly. Ever since then, an operator, a maintenance person and sometimes even a supervisor each apply lubrication to ensure that the bearing never runs dry again. The result is not only wasted and redundant time and effort, but it is also creating a situation that could cause the bearing to fail due to over lubrication. In this situation, using condition-based lubrication techniques such as ultrasonics or acoustics will ensure delivery of the right amount of lubrication at the right time.

2. WAITING:

Areas of waste related to maintenance activities include maintenance personnel waiting for production personnel to issue work permits and work order backlogs. Excessive maintenance work backlog results in slow response, unexpected breakdowns and a high reactive labor percentage. Waiting for tools, parts, documentation, transportation and other items is also wasteful. Waiting is not a value-added activity and must be eliminated or greatly reduced.

3. TRANSPORTATION:

Ask anyone in the plant what he sees maintenance people doing and he will often answer - walking or driving around. Tools stored far from the job or task at hand, commonly use repetitive parts that have not been pre-assembled or kitted, documentation that must be found and work orders for machines that are not available for shutdown. Each activity requires transportation and most do not add value to the maintenance process.

4. PROCESS WASTE:

When performing reactive or breakdown maintenance, repairs are typically conducted to return to productivity as soon as possible. This is counterproductive to performing a longer-term or higher-quality repair. Planning and scheduling for maintenance is like setting up for production. It is key to eliminating process waste - the opportunity cost of lost production.

5. INVENTORY:

A typical maintenance inventory storeroom generally consists of 65 percent needed material and 35 percent obsolete or rarely used material. Consolidating lubrication supply and minimizing the number of suppliers used will eliminate the waste caused by obsolete and redundant inventories. Also Read: Simple Maintenance Lubrication Related Steps YOU Can Implement Today.

6. MOTION:

Wasted motion/unnecessary processes in the maintenance operation usually revolve around preventive maintenance tasks that do not add value to the output. For example, a quarterly oil change on a machine that has not been operated in three years should be extended based on actual lubricant condition as determined by oil analysis.