Does anyone think that Toyota's relentless pursuit of maintenance excellence has anything to do with the fact that their market value is three times larger than GM, Ford and Chrysler combined (according to this article). Funny how focusing on asset performance leads to better results than focusing on finger-pointing and golden parachutes.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/04/news/international/bc.a...oyota.reut/index.htm

I'm curious to what information you have that shows Toyota's committment to maintenance excellence

I am curious myself.

Howard

Here you go:
http://www.mro.com/corporate/pdf/LeanMfgandSAM.pdf

I confess I didn't read this article in depth, but I skimmed it and it seems to me that there was very little about Toyota's maintenance efforts. While I agree with most of what the article contained, it more cited Toyota as doing lean. To do lean well you do need reliable equipment. It's my impression that many of the Japanese manufacturers achieve reliability by doing lots of PM, time based maintenance.

The case study cited in the article is a bicycle manufacturer.

I thought TPM was also mentioned as well as JIT and relentless defect elimination process.

Gents,

I have been studying the LEAN process and how it applies to asset maintenance now for several years.

I occurs to me that the approach most have taken is to directly transfer the concepts from LEAN used on production to the area of asset maintenance.

I think this is fundamentally flawed and have a posting on this in my Blog which may be of interest.