Anyone have suggestions as to a starting point to clean up a maintenance nightmare. They are in 100% fire fighting mode with 30% product changeover on the machinery. What little information there is, it's all on spreadsheets and word of mouth and no time to play with data entry. No training, no analyses of any type, no PM, can't stop production to play catch-up and virtually no budget. Furthermore, all machinery is in house produced with maintenance support and material variations require continues maintenance adjustments.

Typically I find two or more problems but never all at once, this has to be the worst I have ever walked in to and I am at a loss where to start.

You obviously have a nightmare of a job. I havn't had experience of anything that bad. One method which I found to be useful is to tackle each job as it comes up, take photos with one of the cheap digital cameras, take a note of the photo ID as you take it relating it to a part of the machinery or a point in the procedure, and use the photos to make a quick maintenance routine which can be printed out when required, also edited easily. Part numbers, spanner sizes, Bills of Materials, etc can be added. I found MSPowerPoint to be easy to use to make up routines. You will gradually build up information on the machinery which will at least be better than no information.
Good Luck
Joe Mc Cormack

quote:

No training, no analyses of any type, no PM, can't stop production to play catch-up and virtually no budget.

Pattended product - buyer! Sell!!!

You are in run-to-fail mode -- when it fails, fix it. Must have justification to spend money. Do homework on paper realistically with dollar signs that are real. Sounds like they only understand green and not machine - must accompany real dollar amounts with projected profits else why will they listen? And their past record is?

Sorry I can't provide more but can't with what you've input.

Greetings Old Millwright,
As you know, management must accept and support the change in maintenance philosophy. And one way or another, it's going to take budget support to accomplish the objective; there's just no way around it. They may never get out of reactive mode. If margins are that tight, they may get competed out of business. Unfortunately, a business like that tends to spread a feeling of hopelessness among their people, and then comes apathy, followed by a deep distrust of management.

They sound like an industry I used to know. Sometimes entire manufacturing sectors seem to operate in reactive mode like it's the only way they know. Perhaps they think it's cheapest or most efficient, or they think manufacturing is ultimately more important than maintenance of their equipment.

You will need to get some like minded people on board. Are there others who believe as you do? Where does the maintenance management stand? What contacts do you have in management that you can persuade? You could start by linking them up with this group or one of the Reliability Sites.

I know you said that they have no budget, but a CMMS would be a good place to start.

Another good way to start the change in culture is to implement small "continuous improvement teams (CIT)" to tackle problems by area or type. For instance, start a CIT to tackle downtime issues for one machine or area. Hopefully this will result in some recommended PM's and possibly some other solutions that can be applied plant wide. (Make a maintenance man or operator be in charge and form a team of 6-10 floor personnel. Give them the tools to measure their efforts, using production data.)

Old Millwright,

Jack has a really good point with starting teams. I would add try and do the teams with a high visibility machine or something that can give you fast and immediate results. The sooner management can see results in a case like yours, the better for you and the easier it will be to keep the continuous improvement going.

As others have said, document, document, and do even more document. The best thing you can do is to show what is wrong, what you have done to fix it (including costs), and any road blocks you have encountered.

As stated before you need to start with a pilot scheme to show improvement in efficency and reliability to gain support. However before you can do this you need to measure where you are now. This is the only way you can effectively show the gains on the bottom line. Good luck, it takes time and patience!!

Send management to attend a conference, the IMC-2008 could be an eye-opener

Yes sad to say, I am the maintenance management, and the lead mechanic, electrician, programmer, planer, safety officer, environmental manager and more. I have a crew of six on 3 shifts and work with the engineering department to develop new products. I have the job of turning this around to expand. The committee approach seems unfeasible as we are not that big yet. Documentation seems to be the consensus, what I have now are a lot of spreadsheet, word of mouth and some notes at the individual machines. I have yet to see how production keeps their documentation and there are simple part counters at each machine. Is there a consensus how to bring this documentation in to a "user friendly" and understandable format with little training?

Next step seems to be "continuous improvement", somehow supporting moral, to show improvements and reliability?

Some of the older machines are a pile of "Band-Aids", add another fix and another problem magically appears. We have one stripped down and ready for refurbishing but what about the others that seem to be time consuming monsters biting at our keister.

Old Millwright,

You have mentioned around 30% changeover, which means that some of your equipments are used for different types of products overtime.

May I recommend the book of Shigeo Shingo on SMED or Single Minute Exchange of Dies, this will help you cut your downtime on changeover,set-up and conversion.

My advise is pilot one machine for improvement and let the people absorb the learnings. All throughout these years I have learned that whatever improvement initiative we implement, equipments can only be improved if the people will improve themselves.

My Warm Regards,

Is your crew of 6 sufficient?

How about coming up with your top ten hot list and hit list? The hot list to be done within your first 100 days while the hit list for the next one year or two.

Rolly

On changeover, the starting point that I am at now is half astrology, one quarter hunting for parts only to find it need to be made or made to work and one quarter compromising with QA. The dies are extremely small, mechanically they only take minutes to change if you can find all the parts, but could take a day or more to dial them in to the material and tolerance to one tenth of a thow. The SOP I walked in to is snug and tap in to position and hope they don't move when tightened, then play with the heat and speed until it is close to QA spec. Yes I know SMED and others but the starting point that I am at now seems too distant, any more suggestions are more then welcome. No, locating pins or such has failed in the past because of the heat and size of the dies. Moreover the material is a completely unknown variable and immeasurable until it is run. Also with every changeover there is moral problem stemming from the terror and dread of finding something more that is broken.

Lastly, we are hiring to take on the much shortened top one thousand list that needs to be done yesterday...

Heck, if I survive this one I could write a best selling book...

OMw
Are you involved with a prototype or production plant? I started getting the impression it is a prototype plant. What general type of product do you produce?

I did a Google search on low cost CMMS and had several promising returns. It seems to me you need to get your data, including equipment, parts, personnel, breakdown and repair history under control before you can do much else effectively. Then it will take some time for the history to be strong enough for you to base educated decisions upon.

Wally


It's prototype in to production and its heat sealing small bits of foam. I am finding that it seems to be one of those niche markets that no one wants because of the headaches. It is one of those small privately owned looking to expand and I seem to be on the receiving end of the growing pains.

On low cost CMMS, first I have to upgrade some stuff from DOS but training and proving the need seems to be a primary concern and I am making progress on that front.

Old Millwright,
I know where you are coming from, I walked into a similar situation here last fall. The general consensus was that "maintenance" was going to sit and wait for the next emergency. The downtime was counted in hours per day, and the fix often created more problems down the road. I don't have any easy solutions, However I can tell you that a lot of hard work later we have improved the situation dramatically. I now have some ammunition when I go to speak with upper management re: the need for equipment, money, manpower.....
I was granted a CMMS program from the 80's that is more trouble than it is worth, if I were to spend 8 hours a day populating all the required information I would have it ready in another 6 months.
The way that I proceeded to find the light was to A: Document everything. B: show the bean counters the direct corelation between not having the parts and the amount of downtime. C: team building (still trying to work that out) D: promoting ownership, not only of the maintenance crew, but of the operators, and Supervision.
The damaged equipment has mostly gone by the wayside, by forcing production to train the operators better. The downtime is now measured in minutes per month. The parts supply is now also my responsibilty, along with the accounting for my department. The one caveat to removing the purchasing department is that you will spend a great deal of time trying to locate some of the oddball parts (most of my equipment is European and exceedingly difficult to locate parts for here).
I am still in crisis mode in my own mind and anticipate being this way for quite some time yet.
I wish you luck in your new endeavor! With diligence you can see it through!

Old Millwright,

I used to work at a water utility that sounded exactly like your situation. Here's what I did:

1. Forget all that technical 'know-how' for now. This is an interpersonal skill challenge. You may even want to consider becoming a Maintenance Evangelist as your sales and marketing skills will be your best asset.

2. Consider training your guys in the absolute fundamentals of data generation, collection and analysis. I got my guys up to speed in MS Office.

3. View every failure as a Moment of Truth. Root Cause and provide Lessons Learnt. Feel free to plug in any sound bites from your Maintenance Bible

4. Get a pair of good shoes. This is going to be a long journey before Management even recognises that your department actually contributes to overall profitability

ihad the same issues in the 80's when i started here with no help to change. you must start with documentation. i started files on each piece of equipment, what needed repaired list that could be added to, what was repaired, root cause of it. then you must teach the repair men to document the problem correctly, have someone either create a data base or use cmms and how to enter the information properly to track repairs. it is important to see patterns and repair reoccuring first. i also work at a small company and it took me 10 years to get things repaired and a sound preventative program working, and managements backing, but i did not have 6 people to help me. now we do not track downtime for maintenance as it fell below 6% of the maintenance work schedule for 5 years running. we track all downtime for any reasons now and attack areas needed. my biggest assets were documentation, then prevention.

First...Lower your expectations, you won't get
so frustrated! This really needs to be a cultural thing and believe me, it takes time
so baby steps are a must. Safety really needs
to be the top concern, with everyone going
home at the end of there shift and then you
need to define your big hitters and what your
dollar lost will be if you where to lose them,
for some reason this seems to open eyes!?
Good luck but remember, changing a culture takes
time!

Can I clarify what do you by "The material is a completely unknown variable..."?

quote:

Moreover the material is a completely unknown variable and immeasurable until it is run.

I thought any material propeties will be studied first before its usage.

Old Millwright,

You have a sympathetic ear here and without being in your plant walking in your shoes, I can't truly grasp what you're experiencing. You have received a lot of good advice to grow with, and you're looking for the "magic wand" that doesn't exist. Patience and commitment will be your great assets going forward as you climb the ladder to reliability. I was fortunate enough to have Mgmt's support and the addition of key personnel, and it still took 6-months to start seeing the very beginning of ROI from my efforts. It's obvious that extra man hours would be of great assistance, but it doesn't sound like your budget will allow for it. From my reading, you stated that changeover only take a couple of minutes if you can find the parts. Is it possible to create tool boards or kitted boxes that contain the right tools and/or parts in advance and at the ready? If so, this is virtually a zero cost means of "creating" man hours to devote to your problems areas. By no means is this a home run, but it's a start in the right direction. Good luck and keep your chin up. We're all behind you...