MRO Today - Fresh eyes benefit Campbell

Fresh eyes benefit Campbell

by Paul Markgraff

When Spacesaver implemented the lean manufacturing technique Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) on its shelf-support production line, plant management selected a number of employees to participate on a team. The team’s goal was to create a better production process by implementing maintenance changes.

Five-year maintenance veteran Bruce Campbell was the sole maintenance department representative selected for the team.

“Why was it me? I guess at the time I was the new guy in maintenance,” says Campbell. “I had been here just a couple of years, and I think my supervisor put me on it because I had a fresh set of eyes.”

Within Spacesaver’s maintenance department, half of the employees besides Campbell worked for the company for at least 15 years and had seen their fair share of machinery problems.

Sometimes, with a sense of familiarity about the equipment, employees fall into the mindset that this is the way machinery is supposed to run, some equipment always leaks, some problems you can’t fix.

“I hadn’t fallen into that yet,” says Campbell. “I didn’t know that this is the way it was or wasn’t supposed to run. I didn’t know any better or worse.”

This fresh perspective put Campbell in a unique position. During brainstorming sessions, all options were on the table. Campbell and his team realized the maintenance crews would have more time for serious maintenance issues if line operators performed simple, routine maintenance functions.

“The maintenance team can do the small stuff, the routine stuff,” says Campbell. “But, our knowledge and skills are better off doing something else.”

Campbell says he had no problem handing off some jobs to the line operators. His only concern was making sure the operators had the knowledge and training to handle the additional tasks.

“If I give them a little too much knowledge or they have not been sufficiently trained, it can lead to problems,” he says. “We had to find a happy medium on where to draw the line. What could operators do effectively and at what point did they need to call us?”

Campbell says it took time to find the right responsibilities to assign to operators. After some initial work, maintenance realized operators had special talents that went unused under the old run-to-fail production method. With TPM, these talents came to the fore.

“The operators are there all day long,” says Campbell. “They can hear a subtle noise, a subtle change that we in maintenance may not hear. It has a lot to do with trust.”

With his fresh perspective on Line 5, Campbell helped Spacesaver realize production improvements others may have missed. Since successfully implementing TPM, Campbell and his teammates showed other Spacesaver employees the benefits the lean technique can bring.

“In the long run with these activities, we can see it created less work and we are able to be more valuable to the company,” he says. “We are doing a lot of less-costly maintenance.”