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Once again we are offering our highly successful Maintenance Miracle Kaizen event from March 29th through April 1st. For those of you not familiar with these autonomous maintenance events and how they might help you in your company, we thought we would give you some insight from a past event we held at Acushnet’s Ball Plant III.
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Production Preparation Process (3P)—Milestone 13
In the highly competitive world of vinyl siding production, “process yield is king.” A fraction of a percentage point change in yield traditionally is very difficult to attain let alone sustain. So you can imagine what was going through one plant manager’s head when he got the news that yield had to improve 2.4% above last year’s performance.
We were recently contacted by one of our clients to convey how their TPM efforts were progressing… Can you pick out the most important thing?
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Recently, our own Ellis New had an article on Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) published in Industry Week’s on-line newsletter. The article looks at the use and misuse of this often misunderstood metric. Below is an excerpt from that article, to read the entire piece, click on the word MORE below.
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Operational excellence, continuous improvement, lean management—no matter what you call your pursuit of perfection, in order to sustain it employees have to be “engaged.
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Absent TPM, the Lean Enterprise Doesn't Happen.
Developing a strategy to establish TPM – and integrate it as part of a lean transformation – begins with analyzing and understanding the key areas that need to be improved throughout your operations.
Quoting movie dialog is a big thing in my family. I am not sure how it started, but we do it often. Last week at a SMED training session, an attendee was reeling off movie lines to his team members.
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In a memorable scene from the movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” one of the bad guys challenges Indiana Jones to a sword fight. As the challenger brandishes his sword in preparation for battle, Indiana sizes him up for a moment, then just pulls out his gun and shoots him. Duel over.
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I shared this experience with some of my contacts earlier this week, but wanted to post it here as well as it might be of use to some of our readers…
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Recently I was working with a project team looking at machine data for a key piece of equipment. The data showed the machine had several sporadic losses in that particular week. To dig deeper into the data, we spoke to the operators and maintenance staff; one seasoned associate told us, “Oh, I know what caused that loss, we’ve had to fix that a few times.”
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