Managing Process Downtime -- What Are the Biggest Mistakes?

In September, Michael Beauregard published a book entitled Process Downtime Reduction: How to Minimize Waste from Breakdowns, Set-Ups, Supply Chain Issues, and Staffing Constraints. This book provides manufacturers the techniques they crucially need to keep their critical manufacturing equipment running correctly and efficiently – which increases production, decreases labor costs, decreases breakdown costs, and ultimately increases the bottom line. 

When I spoke with Michael this month, I asked him: “What are some of the biggest mistakes manufacturers make while trying to manage process downtime?” Here is his complete answer:

That is an excellent question. 

I think the biggest mistake manufacturers make with managing process downtime is that they don’t manage it – instead, they learn to live with it. They make longer runs so that they can amortize the cost of that long product changeover over more parts. They get the order out by working overtime at the end of the month. They buy more equipment than they actually need. Manufacturers are smart – they learn to adapt to survive, but often those adaptations are the fastest way to solve the problem now and not the most efficient.  

Another big mistake is not measuring downtime and where it occurs. As I wrote in Process Downtime Reduction, “Show me the data!” Many companies cannot. They have anecdotal evidence of their downtime. It takes about two hours to complete a changeover. They remember they ran out of bottles once two years ago so they are focusing tremendous efforts and costs to manage inventory at high levels when the numbers actually show that labor is their biggest downtime cause. They do not make a systematic effort to understand the downtime and where it occurs so they attack where they perceive the downtime problems to be and not the issues that cause the greatest amount of downtime. 

And a third big area is not getting the whole workforce involved. Well, maybe “involved” is the wrong word. They fail to change the culture of the workforce to be looking for wastes in the operation. They load and unload parts without thinking that the machine could have been co-extruding 10 minutes earlier if they hadn’t waited until the core had run out to notify the material handler that another roll of core was needed. 

Do you agree with Michael's thoughts here? How does process downtime affect your organization? What do you do to manage it?

Reactive Improvement and Effective Daily Management

In December, Ross Kennedy published a book entitled Understanding, Measuring, and Improving Daily Management: How to Use Effective Daily Management to Drive Significant Process Improvement . This book explains the critical parts of a continuous improvement strategy to achieve operational excellence and where reactive improvement through effective daily management fits in.

During a recent conversation with Ross, I asked him: “What is reactive improvement and why aren’t more companies embracing it?” Here is his complete answer:

To achieve operational excellence, organizations need a continuous-improvement strategy that includes reactive improvement to ensure you have effective daily management, stable production, or work plan to minimize fire-fighting caused by unplanned changes and proactive Improvement to take you to your improvement vision of world-class performance. Unfortunately, many organizations get so focused on proactive improvement through capital projects or operational excellence initiatives such as Lean, Six Sigma, or Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), that they lose sight of the importance of reactive improvement and having a stable production or work plan.

Reactive improvement develops the capability and discipline within the organization to be able to rapidly recover from an event or incident that stops you from achieving your expected or target performance for the day, shift, or hour and most importantly, your ability to capture the learning and initiate corrective actions so that the event or incident will not re-occur anywhere across the organization.

As such, reactive improvement focuses on improving daily management through your daily review meetings, your information centers supporting the daily review meetings, and your problem-solving root cause analysis capability at all levels, especially at the frontline.There are seven key elements of reactive improvement that must work in concert for effective daily management: 

1. A supportive organization structure to support development of your frontline people so they have ownership and accountability for the performance of their area of responsibility. 
2. Effective frontline leaders to ensure everyone else in the leadership structure are not working down a level. 
3. Appropriate measures with expected targets that are linked to the site’s key success factors for operations to ensure goal alignment and are relevant for the focused areas. 
4. Structured daily review meetings to identify opportunities (problems/incidents) and monitor progress of their solution so they don’t happen again. 
5. Visual information centers that visually display daily and trending performance along with monitoring of actions to address problems/issues raised.
6. Frontline problem-solving root cause analysis capability across the site. 
7. Rapid sharing of learning capability across shifts, departments and the organization. 

What do think of Ross's overview of reactive improvement? Do you practice this technique in your company?

Does Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) Improve Manufacturing Processes?

“How does OEE systematically improve your manufacturing processes?” -- That was the question I recently posed to Ross Kennedy, author of a recently published book entitled Understanding, Measuring, and Improving Overall Equipment Effectiveness: How to Use OEE to Drive Significant Process Improvement. Ross is recognized as Australasia’s leading authority on total productive maintenance (TPM) and continuous improvement, and he had some key insights. Here is his complete answer:

OEE or Overall Equipment Effectiveness was created during the development of the Toyota Production System to help understand all the losses that could affect equipment performance so as to reduce lead times and improve quality, rather than relying on the traditional approach of measuring just equipment downtime. I first came across the concept in 1989 in a Productivity Press book titled TPM Development Program. It outlined that equipment could only be effective if it was Available when required, running at the ideal or theoretical speed or Rate (very best in ideal situation), and producing good Quality output first time. Hence OEE = Availability% x Rate% x Quality%.

Originally OEE involved the Six Big Losses (equipment failure, sets and adjustments, idling and minor stops, reduced speed, process defects, reduced yield) , however in more recent times this has been expanded to seven losses with the inclusion of planned downtime when the operating crew are at work.

OEE is often referred to as the measure that allows you to expose and capture the "hidden factory" within your plant. Often sites will identify opportunities worth 20% to 50% more capacity from their production lines or processes with little or no capital expenditure simply by fully understanding and doing something about all the losses that stop their equipment from being effective. I have certainly witnessed this in manufacturing, mining, and process industries during the past 20 years of applying this learning in a structured discipline way.

I have found when studied in detail, OEE losses can be attributed to three key areas:

• Technical issues such as design weaknesses or poor maintenance practices.
• People Development issues such as poorly trained operators or maintainers who lack an understand of prevention at source for equipment.
• Management issues such as inappropriate organization structures, rostering, recruitment, daily management policies, planned maintenance and planned break times.

Once identified and actioned, the improvement results can be very significant.

One mine site in Indonesia reported at an international conference in Asia how over two years they saved over US$135million by focusing OEE improvement on their run-of-mine. At Australia’s largest privately owned brewery, OEE was used to increase the capacity of their main production line by more than 15% each year to defer the need to increase to a two-shift operation for three years while still meeting the growth of their business which was reported in the local media as 17.5% average yearly growth from 1993 to 2012.

Unfortunately at many sites, OEE has become the most misused and abused indicator of equipment performance with some sites changing the definitions to make it appear better as they are required to submit it to corporate for comparison between other sites.

At one large multi-national food manufacturing site I visited they were boasting about their high OEE performance, however when I delved into the way they were measuring OEE, I realised that they had removed Planned Downtime and Set-up or Changeover Downtime and had an Ideal speed set at the standard average speed used for setting budgets and doing costing (typically 20% lower than true ideal or theoretical speed). In effect, they were hiding many opportunities for improvement so that they could report a good performance figure to corporate management. In other words, they had a culture of always trying to look good rather than seeking out opportunities for continuous improvement.

OEE should be seen and used as a "driver" for improvement, not as a performance measure to be compared or benchmarked between equipment and sites. As a "driver" for improvement, the definition for OEE should have a 100% correlation to the good output produced from your line or plant. In other words, if OEE increases by 10% then you should be making 10% more good output or making the same amount of good output within 10% less time, hence the need for the OEE definition to include all the seven losses. 

What are you thoughts on Ross Kennedy's perspective on the use of OEE for process performance improvements? Do you use OEE as a key performance indicator of manufacturing productivity?

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and Lean Maintenance -- What's the Difference?

“What is the difference between Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and Lean Maintenance?”

That's the question I just posed to Torsten Dederichs, who just published a new book entitled Lean Maintenance: A Practical, Step-By-Step Guide for Increasing Efficiency with Javier Girón Blanco. Considering the amount of money industrial companies spend maintaining their plants and  maintenancing their equipment, I figured it'd be best to include his entire answer here:

What is the difference between onions and apples? Onions are vegetables and apples are fruits.

The first principle of TPM is that the operator is the first line of defense against unplanned downtime. Because operators know their equipment best, they can identify problems long before they get critical. This approach is  a very valuable approach for increasing reliability and reducing  wasted time and repairs.

But what happens when the operators cannot solve the issue themselves? What if the repair needs skilled crafts or engineers? The operator raises a maintenance notification, which launches the maintenance process. And in this same second the operator leaves the TPM world and hands over his engine to our “Lean Maintenance” approach.

Maintenance technicians are the "go-to folks" when machines break down. They are modern-day heroes who can fix anything at anytime. The role of the “hero” becomes evident when maintenance starts to work in a predominantly reactive mode, fire-fighting its way through the day. At this point,  employees begin to view maintenance as a necessary evil because it is basically a cost center that requires management attention as well as capital (spare parts inventory) and personnel. This sentiment is exacerbated when maintenance is performed “at all costs” -- work orders take more time, money and effort to get done, budgets are exceeded, and an unhealthy relationship develops between maintenance and production. At this point, upper management starts to consider ways to get costs under control: top-down cost reductions (meaning that less maintenance gets done, with the corresponding availability risk) and partial or total outsourcing. These measures can provide a quick fix but will not resolve the firefighting nor fix the broken relationship between maintenance and production. This situation can lead to frustration, as things go back to where they were before. To break this vicious circle we propose a different approach.

Maintenance can be a source of profitability by ensuring high availability. As mentioned previously, companies with an efficient and effective maintenance function have a clear competitive advantage. A Lean maintenance function ensures that all resources are dedicated to value-adding activities, taking out the process “waste,” and being able to do more with the current resources.

To achieve Lean maintenance, many elements must be in place: the interfaces between production and maintenance along the full maintenance process must be smooth and maintenance work must be properly selected, prioritized, planned, scheduled and carried out. Everyone involved in the process should know how he or she can contribute to this goal.

The description of the ideal maintenance process and the method for achieving it is the focus of Lean Maintenance: A Practical, Step-By-Step Guide for Increasing Efficiency.


What do you consider the differences between TPM and Lean maintenance? Have you practiced Lean maintenance in your company?  

Book Talk: Total Productive Maintenance

Total Productive Maintenance probably doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves. It is a critically important part of a lean strategy, but it is not as exciting or dramatic as some other aspects of lean. However, TPM – when properly implemented – can produce significant benefits of reduced downtime, lower maintenance or repair costs, and increased capacity.

We publish numerous books about TPM and the TPM-related metric of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). If machines are an important part of your operations, then TPM should be as well, and you may want to consider one or more of these books:

• Uptime, 2nd Edition: Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management
• TPM: Collected Practices and Cases
• P-M Analysis: AN ADVANCED STEP IN TPM IMPLEMENTATION
• Practical TPM: Successful Equipment Management at Agilent Technologies
• TPM in Process Industries
• TPM for the Lean Factory: Innovative Methods and Worksheets for Equipment Management
• Autonomous Maintenance in Seven Steps: Implementing TPM on the Shop Floor
• Implementing TPM: The North American Experience
• TPM for Workshop Leaders

In addition, our Shopfloor series of training manuals includes books on TPM, autonomous maintenance and focused equipment improvement, some of which come in versions for supervisors and/or learning packages.

We also have a new book coming out next year, The OEE Primer: Understanding Overall Equipment Effectiveness, Reliability, and Maintainability .

Do you have a question or comment about a book(s) that you would like addressed in Book Talk? Email me directly at Ralph.bernstein@taylorandfrancis.com.