Lean Maintenance: Can I do it?

Some time ago, I chatted with a friend in LinkedIn about maintenance, my friend claimed if maintenance is a Non-Value Added group of tasks we mustn’t provide it resources because they will be wastes.

I agree the maintenance is a Non-Value Added group of tasks, but it is not a waste, maintenance is required for the process because if you don’t perform maintenance you stop the process or you produce defect. What can we do? Lean gives us the solution: to perform the maintenance tasks as fast and effectively as possible.

And Lean provides us the tools to perform tasks in a fast and effective way.

 5S, Poka Yoke, Spaghetti Chart and 5 Why must walk with a good TPM plan. But also we can add creative solutions to reduce wastes, e.g. we can install a camera or a webcam in front of a machine while the maintainers are working, the task is to optimize when they don’t need to go out of the camera lens during the task.

What about SMED? I know is a tool of Lean Manufacturing but we can use SMED to optimize repair time in regular tasks.

And Visual Management, Can we use it to manage the maintenance function? The car workshops already use it, Visual Management is an excellent tool for a real-time management of our maintenance team.

Do you use any other Lean tools in your maintenance tasks? Please, tell us and we comment it.

Esta es la versión en inglés del artículo publicado en osenseis.com, puedes encontrar el artículo original en http://www.osenseis.com/mantenimiento-lean-es-posible-hacerlo/