Steps for Achieving Lean Maintenance

Like lean manufacturing, lean principles are the foundation for success in maintenance. In a resource-intensive environment, anything that improves efficiency and productivity is essential. So what is lean maintenance and how does it benefit your bottom line?

Lean maintenance is the reduction and elimination of waste at every stage of your maintenance program so you can go further faster, while spending less. Lean maintenance equals performance. But how do you achieve lean principles in your maintenance program?

Let’s outline the basics for building and measuring a lean maintenance program, including:

The types of waste in maintenance.
A formula for creating a lean maintenance strategy.
Bottom-line business benefits for an automated maintenance program.

Three Types of Maintenance Waste

Let’s examine the three types of maintenance and reliability waste.

1. Environmental Waste. This occurs when raw materials are used or disposed of inefficiently because of inefficient maintenance activities. Examples include:

An increase in scrap or rework after equipment maintenance.
Fuel overuse by improperly maintained vehicles or unnecessary transportation to and from a worksite.
Overstocking parts for maintenance due to an outdated inventory purchasing schedule.

Effects of this waste include harmful, unsustainable byproducts such as more pollution and trash, higher carbon emissions, low-quality products and increased safety hazards.

Some strategies you can use to cut environmental waste in maintenance are:

Frequent inventory cycle counts and less inventory purchasing to confirm your storeroom isn’t overstocked.
Grouping scheduled maintenance together in one time-period to cut down on travel.
A mandatory check from a second technician after repairs or replacements before production, to reduce scrap or rework.

2. Financial Waste. These extra costs from inefficient maintenance include lost production from unnecessary downtime. Examples include:

High labor and parts costs from preventive maintenance (PM) tasks performed too frequently.
Defective products from an asset that was assembled or rebuilt incorrectly.
Delayed maintenance because technicians had to wait for a part to complete repairs.

Financial waste affects the entire company through higher labor and parts costs, more capital expenditures, lost revenue and missed opportunities for business growth.

Some strategies for reducing financial waste include:

Identifying tasks in your preventive maintenance schedule that can be eliminated or done less frequently.
Reducing downtime by finding maintenance work that can be completed while an asset is running.
Building a failure reporting, analysis and corrective action system to address and help prevent failure on critical equipment.
Creating parts kits for critical equipment to speed up repairs and avoid “stockout” and setting a regular meeting with production staff to align maintenance with operations.

Table providing best-practice metrics for how to mitigate types of industrial maintenance waste.

Areas for Eliminating Maintenance Waste

These are some best-practice metrics you can start with to address each type of maintenance waste. Click to enlarge this table.

3. Wasted Human Capital. This includes administrative work and unnecessary tasks that take staff away from specialized tasks only they can do. When human capital is wasted, fatigue, poor morale and turnover increase, leading to additional waste and lost organizational knowledge.

Examples include:

Spending hours writing.
Reviewing and sorting work orders each day.
Fixing the same component multiple times.
Inspecting noncritical equipment with low or nonexistent failure rates.
Supporting production instead of specialized maintenance tasks.
Searching for parts and supplies in the stockroom.

High employee turnover and lost company knowledge are two effects of wasted human capital. The impact also manifests as higher backlogs, decreased employee engagement and less accurate data.

Strategies for becoming leaner include:

Frequent maintenance team meetings to discuss challenges and brainstorm solutions.
Automate activities you do frequently, such as creating work orders or reports.
Eliminate or reduce scheduled maintenance for equipment with a low follow-up rate.
Train machine operators to do routine maintenance tasks.

Building a Lean Maintenance Strategy

To counter waste, follow a three-step formula:

Understand what you’re currently doing and the process you’re using.
Find areas of waste and mitigate them.
Pursue a long-term vision that allows you to do steps #1 and #2 repeatedly.

Step 1: Mapping Your Maintenance Process. This step is about knowing how your team currently operates so you can identify work you’re doing too much or not enough. This stage involves documenting your maintenance processes, including:

Key information about equipment, such as criticality and failure modes.
What inspections and repairs are done, and how often.
Parts purchasing and storeroom management.
What an emergency looks like and how your team reacts.
How follow-up or corrective maintenance is created, assigned and tracked.
Goal setting, metrics creation, reporting and data collection.
Health, safety and compliance activities.

Next, review business needs such as:

Production levels by season.
High and low sales periods.
Reactionary needs to previous emergencies.
Organization goals and resources.

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Step 2: Identify Opportunities for Improvement You Can Act on Now. The next step is to discover where you’re spending too much time, money or energy. Here are a few ways you can spot waste in your processes:

Review specific processes with members of your maintenance team. Ask them what part of the process takes the most time or where they face challenges when completing work. Use this insight to make activities easier and remove roadblocks.
Identify tasks that consistently take more time or money than planned and conduct a “root cause analysis” to determine why.
Audit your planned maintenance work to make it more efficient. Question the need for all regular maintenance and the frequency, timing and resources for each task.
Develop KPIs and metrics around the growth and success of your team. This data will allow you to find wasted potential.

Step 3: Build a Long-Term Vision. Creating a lean maintenance program starts with a lean maintenance mindset. You must ask the right questions, challenge the way you do things, and be willing to change.

Begin by building maintenance activities around business and production goals, and lessen or minimize work that doesn’t connect to these goals.

Next, begin using a proactive maintenance response rather than a reactive response. A lean maintenance strategy hinges on data and taking the time to collect it. Five extra minutes completing extra fields on a work order add up.

Allocate time in your schedule to account for reporting critical data. And inform your maintenance team about the importance of these extra steps.

The Table (on the right) shows some best-practice metrics you can start with to address each type of maintenance waste.

Moving from Reactive to Proactive Maintenance

Changing your maintenance strategy from reactive to proactive is a process that begins with small changes over time. But these small changes lead to significant benefits like lower direct costs (labor and resources) and indirect costs (lost revenue due to downtime or lost production). Learn to mark progress with small goals and milestones, track progress and celebrate success.

If done right, it’s a process that’s never truly finished. Adopt a “win-or-learn” mentality instead of a “win-or-fail” mindset.

Allow your team to question the status quo without blame or punishment. You and your maintenance team will see success as a series of small, continuous changes that affect your bottom line and overall performance.

For example, in lean maintenance, a best practice is to examine work orders once a month to reduce delays and increase wrench time by 10% to 15% a year. It’s critical to track progress and celebrate it with your team.

And encourage suggestions from staff on best practices. Technicians will feel a sense of ownership over this metric and will be invested in achieving progress.

Using a CMMS

A modern computerized maintenance software (CMMS) solution is a best practice for achieving lean maintenance. It can help you execute on lean maintenance to increase efficiency. Removing unnecessary work and administrative tasks helps employees feel more engaged with their work. It also gives them time to train and perform high-value work.

Maintenance and Business Needs

At its core, lean maintenance is about tying maintenance practices to business needs. It’s a critical step to move maintenance from a cost center to a value driver. And when accomplished, the maintenance team becomes a true business partner.

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