by Paul V. Arnold

A few years back, I was invited to visit the showcase plant of a well-known manufacturing company. My host, the corporate communications manager, wanted to display this plant’s progress and prowess in the area of lean. I was ushered to the production floor, introduced to the two operations managers, and shown wonderful examples of U-shaped cells, WIP reduction, andons, kanban, etc.

“You really streamlined the production portion of your business!” I said. “Now, how has lean impacted the maintenance department?”

“The maintenance guys took out the old conveyors and moved the machines around,” the communications guy said with pride.

“No. I meant, how have lean principles been brought into the maintenance organization and eliminated the waste and inefficiency in that portion of the business?” I explained.

The three managers furrowed their eyebrows in unison and looked at me like I had come from another planet. “You don’t understand,” one of the operations managers said. “This is our lean manufacturing program.”

The unspoken message was, “Lean isn’t about maintenance. We made our U-shaped cells. We reduced our scrap and finished inventory. We put up boards that display our key metrics. We’re a lean manufacturer. We’re done.”

This company took the term “lean manufacturing” literally. Unfortunately, it’s a common occurrence. At many plants, maintenance is left out of the lean initiative. Heck, maintenance leaders are rarely invited. Last year, manufacturers sent 1,100 of their leaders to the country’s largest lean event, the Association for Manufacturing Excellence’s conference. Ten of them were listed with a maintenance-related title. Of the 250 leaders who attended MRO Today’s two Lean Manufacturing University conferences last year, six were from maintenance.

You aren’t “done” when research shows that for a typical plant: wrench time is 25 to 30 percent of a maintenance mechanic’s workday; “emergencies” constitute 60 to 80 percent of maintenance department work orders; overall equipment effectiveness is 50 to 60 percent; and, a host of major internal roadblocks (including bad data, a lack of goals and a lack of a comprehensive strategy) stand in the way of maintenance work order efficiency and overall organization.

In the world of lean, you are only as lean as your fattest link.

Enormous opportunities exist for those that take “lean manufacturing” to mean “total efficiency in all of the components that comprise the manufacturing company’s business.”  “All” includes the maintenance department.

To learn how to bring lean principles into your plant maintenance department, attend our next conference, “LMU4: Bringing Lean into Maintenance,” May 23-25 in Las Vegas.

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