Adding value 07 December 2011

Talk to Lean specialists and, surprisingly, they'll tell you the real deal in equipment service is not planned, nor even preventive maintenance. Brian Tinham talks to Dennis McCarthy about how transform engineering

"Most engineers don't want to fix the same fault for the rest of their lives; they would rather use their engineering knowhow to improve things." So says Dennis McCarthy, Lean consultant with DAK Consulting, who specialises in 'Lean Maintenance' – taking the ideas and objectives of 'Lean Manufacturing' to plant and equipment servicing and repair.

For McCarthy, maintenance is seen by far too many plant managers as flying in the face of Lean precepts: at best, a necessary evil, at worst, costly waste. That, he says, is because maintenance engineers and technicians are mostly tasked with minimising downtime. Hence the myopic focus on planned and/or preventive maintenance, which entails endlessly walking plants and factories, inspecting equipment, finding nothing amiss, moving on to the next, etc.

"If they're not actually doing anything to the plant, they're not adding value, and it's easy to see why they get the label they do," explains McCarthy. The problem, as he sees it, is that, while most of manufacturing has been on the 'Lean journey' for many years, this whole value-adding, waste-eliminating ideology has largely passed maintenance departments by.

"They may have done some stuff with 5S [Lean's recommended sort, set in order, shine, standardise, sustain] and shadow boards [forcing correct spares availability], but maintenance has not really been considered from a true Lean perspective. And the thing about Lean is that it was evolved by academics, through observation – looking at what's different about Japanese companies."

So while it's not difficult to see what makes Lean tick; introducing it is another matter. Hence, if your maintenance isn't working as well as it could, it's not immediately obvious how to introduce Lean and score the kinds of successes that manufacturing has been shouting about.

Either way, McCarthy believes that, precisely because maintenance is seen as non-value-adding, some management teams are even tempted to take Lean thinking to its ultimate and cut servicing to the bone. They get away with it for a while, but then, rather like switching off the gas on a hot air balloon, they come down to earth with a bump. Without maintenance around to see what's going wrong and why, the result is even higher costs and downtime, with plant requiring major overhauls instead of running repairs.

"You can only go so far in cutting maintenance costs," comments McCarthy. It's an aside, but he notes that in the process plant world, the rule of thumb is 3% of asset value spent on maintenance, with labour roughly double the material costs. That's fine, but it masks another important measure – engineering quality. "Quality of maintenance can impact asset life by as much as 50%," agrees McCarthy. Clearly, risking one third of your potential plant life could turn out to be an expensive gamble.

But there is a better way. Changing all this is about first understanding that for maintenance to be viewed as Lean, the emphasis needs to shift from preventing downtime to preventing defects.

And how do you do that?
"There are only two reasons for defects: equipment wearing out and human error," explains McCarthy. "With the first, you know the parts that wear, so you need to take steps to replace them or mitigate problems so that machines don't become less precise in their function and impact quality. For the second, the solution is standard operating procedures, which then reduce the risk of breakdowns, in the end to zero."

Zero breakdowns? McCarthy agrees it sounds farfetched, but explains he means major failures, not minor stops. He insists that around 1% of plants are getting there – invariably by maintaining their equipment in the right condition and by providing operator training to do so.

"In TPM [total productive maintenance] we deliberately monitor minor stops, caused, for example, by jams. Why? Because just clearing them is not enough: it's only a temporary solution, since it only deals with the symptom, not the cause. Maintenance teams doing well are those that anticipate breakdowns by watching the minor stops and understanding what they mean."

Getting to this level doesn't happen overnight. McCarthy reckons it's an 18 month journey. He cites one major plant in his experience that moved from a breakdown every four minutes to one in two hours over a three month period. "If you never strive for it, you never get it," he quips.

Part of that is about changing the KPIs that matter: for example, moving from measuring the time between unplanned stops to the time between interventions aimed at avoiding defects. They are radically different, and this change drives managers', engineers' and technicians' behaviour. Actually improving this measure is about looking for, and using, early problem indicators beyond minor breakdowns. On a process plant, for example, they might include the quality of flow from a utility pump, even oil consumption on a highly-loaded compressor.

And the point is that, with the indicators known and acted upon, and the plant running with fewer breakdowns and closer to design specification, the role for maintenance engineers changes – to also extending the time between interventions but also improving plant operations, capacity, consistency etc. Then Lean maintenance is finally seen as value adding, and you're into the virtuous circle.

In short, if equipment is no longer seriously breaking down, then maintenance has more time to work on process improvement projects. So it gets better at understanding the machines, processes, and cause and effect. Then the processes get even better, with more uptime and better quality. Maintenance engineers and the project work they do is valued even more highly. And so on.

Sadly, all too often, maintenance teams don't get there. At some point, management refocuses on 'improving efficiency', and misguidedly embarks on enthusiastic cost cutting of the maintenance team and its work. Such initiatives can make sense for a while – nothing is beyond improvement. However, as McCarthy says, they break the 'Lean Maintenance' cycle and it's not long till you're back with the old ways.

Six steps to maintenance stardom

1. Prioritise your plant assets and systematically get them into the right condition.
2. Simplify and standardise regular inspection and maintenance, with a view to handing that over to operators.
3. Define the skills you need in production and maintenance to achieve that and fill in the gaps. Allow 18 months to two years for the first three steps.
4. Make it stick by changing the maintenance culture, from planned inspections and fire fighting to plant improvement project work, with accountability.
5. Develop KPIs that will reinforce the new behaviour, focusing particularly on those that flag up opportunities to make significant improvements.
6. Reinforce standard operating procedures for each asset, covering simplified servicing and the identifiers and activities to prevent breakdown – ensuring that operators are up to date on training, have documentation and are held accountable.

It's good to talk
The importance of the art of communication cannot be exaggerated – and maintenance is no exception. As Dave Manning-Ohren, service team leader with MRO specialist Eriks, says, if maintenance doesn't talk to the service provider about why equipment has been pulled, then they're missing an opportunity to prevent the problem from arising again.
"People don't look at failure modes and communicate those to the repair shop," he explains. "So maintenance might receive an electric motor for repair, and they could overhaul it, check the balance and send it back – when the issue might have been the drive end bearing. And that might be wearing because of contaminated grease or poor alignment."
Manning-Ohren urges engineering teams to remember that linking condition monitoring to repair, and vice versa, can pay serious dividends.
"Rather than simply providing instructions, such as 'repair as required' or 'change bearings', take the time to indicate root cause. If it turns out to be contaminated grease, for example, there might be opportunities to improve the sealing. They might be spending tens of thousands of pounds pulling the equipment. It's got to be worth passing on information about the problem."

Brian Tinham

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