Section N. Planned Maintenance Takes Too Long

N. Planned Maintenance Takes Too Long

Overview

Regularly (particularly in the manufacturing industry) we purposefully shut down the process to conduct needed repair or upgrades to it. In the case of a sold-out process, every second lost represents lost revenue from the process. Even if the process is not sold out, the need to maintain delivery to Customers will invoke one or more of the standard buffers of

• Time. Promise longer delivery times.

• Inventory. Build stock prior to the shutdown to cover the downtime.

• Capacity. Keep extra (usually costly) equipment on hand to substitute for the lost capacity during the shutdown.

The aim with this type of project is to ensure that when the process is shut down, it is brought back online as quickly as possible.

Examples

• Industrial. Vessel cleaning, line maintenance

• Healthcare. Operating room sterilization, renovation, and upgrades

• Service/Transactional. Haulage equipment maintenance (locomotives, tractor units)

Measuring Performance

Measurement in this case is for the clock time from when the process stops to when the process starts again. During the downtime, we might also consider the Total Work Content (the key driver for labor cost), but this is basically a secondary metric and could be considered to be an X.

Tool Approach

If we define the problem as the shortening of downtime, it is entirely analogous to rapid changeover/setup and thus we can proceed directly to Section O in this chapter.