To All,

Last March 2007, I was priviledge to speak at a Reliability Conference here in our country, the resource speaker was actually meant for Vee Narayan, however, he was busy with his schedule and recommended the organizers my name to take his place and luckily I was chosen. I was to speak about Root Cause Failure Analysis for 2 hours but rather it was cut to 1.5 hours.


Before my alloted time, another presentor was talking about Lean Manufacturing and showing presentation until a slide which he shows about the effects of Multi-skilling to their plant rose a lot of questions. His graph shows from 36 maintenance people, it was reduce to 6 because of multi-skilling which he presented proudly.

When one of the participants ask What did you do with the rest of the people, he said " WE RETIRE THEM ?"

It ate a lot of my time presenting because a burst of questions flurred up because of this.

My question is this, Is Lean really meant to retire people ? If the answer to this is YES, then I think there are 2 factors that Lean Manufacturing do not understand.

1st - Multi-skilling is not applicable if antropometric factors are present, this is stated clearly in John Moubray RCM book, antropometric factor refers to the size, shape of the person, if a job to be done is required by a person 5ft 9inches in height on a minimum you cannot replace a short person to do multi-skilling work.


2nd - Lean must understand the grandeur and diversity of the maintenance function, if we speak about maintenance we speak about a vast diversify lists of positions and not only technicians or those fixing the equipments.

- Spare parts management
- CMMS
- Reliability groups such as RCM
- Fractographer
- Failure Analyst
- Tribologist
- Oil Analyst if there is inside lab
- Predictive Maintenance
- Technical Training
- etc etc etc

Why not place these people on other aspects of maintenance such as spare parts or the rest instead of retiring them for good ?

This is my thoughts about lean, if I understand it wrong, can someone enlighten me ?

I simply refuse to teach continuous improvement initiatives that is meant to retire people for good. This is not the way to save cost.


My Warm Regards,

Greetings Rolly,
36 down to 6 people eh? I doubt that a 6x reduction can be accomplished by changing to a multi-skill philosophy alone. Let me play with the numbers a minute…

36 to 6 is a nice round multiplier. Let’s assume the 6 multi-skilled people are 100% work loaded.
Multi-skill = 6 = 100% work load
Single-skill = 36 = 100/6 = 16.67% work load

Either the crew of 36 were doing nothing most of the time or the work load was cut to match the new crew size or a combination of both. It’s hard to believe a company could allow 16.67% work loading on a continuous basis. It’s also hard to believe the presenter’s story as simply stated.

I’ve worked both single-craft as an electrician and multi-craft as an Electrician/Automation Engineer/Instrument Tech/Apprentice Millwright/Apprentice Plumber/Apprentice Mechanic. I can’t say the crew was reduced by a factor of 6 simply because of using the multi-skill philosophy. The craft SKILL LEVEL was reduced because the craftsman could no longer focus solely on improving their chosen craft. I was very glad to get back to a single skill electrical position so I could improve my skill set again.

My personal opinion is that there are a lot of buzz words out there and occasionally someone in a corporate position grabs on to one of them and makes it the company focus of the day. I also think consultants are selling products (Lean Maintenance, FMEA, RCM, etc.) in such a way that contributes to the confusion. We all need paychecks. Not totally a bad thing as they are getting levels of recognition out there. Reliability Engineers employed in internal maintenance positions have to do whatever we can to keep it all working efficiently and fight the misconceptions out there.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Wally,

Maybe that same presenter should be invited to speak again 4 years from now, if the company still exists...

That is one of the problems that Lean Manufacturing has run into during its rise in western culture. It has mistakenly identified Maintenance as a cost... or waste that should be reduced instead of a "Value Stream" that is of benefit to the process. It is only after reducing this "Waste", the suffing the consiquences of reduced efficiencies, reduction in quality, etc.
Simply put:
Well Maintained Machines produce many quality parts
Poorly Maintained Machines produce fewer parts of lower quality
Broken Machines produce NO Parts
It is my understanding that this revelation is what has spawned Lean Maintenance and TPM (Total Productive Maintenance).
A Maintenance Dept can't fit the mold of Lean Manufacturing, but can adopt some of the principals/tools of these programs to improve. But 36 > 6, Come On! Next he will be promising no more rain on weekends