Everything within the manufacturing environment is a battle between efficiency and waste. It doesn’t take a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt to understand that less waste means better efficiency! However, it does take core knowledge of lean principles to understand how to reduce waste in order to facilitate efficiency. Maintenance is the clearest example of this.
Leaner manufacturing maintenance practices don’t just spawn out of recognizing waste. They’re the product of progressive improvement, measured by Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Identifying waste in the manufacturing process and using KPI drivers to eliminate waste is the fundamental approach of any lean maintenance program.
Why strive to be lean?
The lean philosophy offers opportunities for fundamental improvement in the way we approach maintenance at its most basic level. Aside from simply eliminating waste in your manufacturing process, embracing lean maintenance practices provides numerous benefits:
- Better planning and scheduling capabilities
- Higher Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)
- Empowerment of maintenance teams and techs
- Better compliance against industry standards
- Process uniformity for better teaching and quality control
- Opportunity for autonomous processes
In order to reap these benefits, lean-driven professionals need to look at process improvement from a quantitative standpoint. This means developing and tracking KPIs.
Critical KPIs for lean maintenance
Determining good KPIs means looking broadly at the processes you’re trying to improve, then identifying variables contributing to each process. While different KPIs may be more or less valuable depending on the process, a few important figures are important to track across the board. Here are six of them:
Percentage of scheduled maintenance versus unscheduled maintenance- Unexpected outages and costs by work order, machine, or department
- Cost of maintenance and repair against productive value, per machine
- The measure of overall equipment efficiency (percentage of scheduled uptime)
- Time to completion for scheduled and unscheduled maintenance tasks
- Failure frequency and time between failures
Each of these KPIs yields insight into the effectiveness of a maintenance plan. When combined with more focused KPIs or process evaluations, these measurements may yield actionable theories about how to make maintenance more efficient.
Because every manufacturing plant
runs on its own set of production KPIs, it’s also smart to juxtapose maintenance KPIs against manufacturing data. Tracking Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) against overall equipment efficiency, for example, could tell you where problems exist in the maintenance approach of a specific machine.
Why measure KPIs?
KPIs aren’t bureaucratic busywork; they’re essential for improvement. KPIs will give you the tangible data you need to identify and eliminate waste, while reducing drivers of this waste such as breakdowns, slow cycles, production rejects, quality control defects, and more.
The battle of efficiency versus waste will always be present in manufacturing environments — at least until we achieve a zero-downtime factory. Adopting KPIs will help tip the scales in favor of efficiency by shining a light on waste. Establish, track, and evaluate maintenance KPIs to see the opportunities for maintenance improvement that may not be immediately prevalent on the factory floor.