Lean Facilities Management
Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) helps create a lean enterprise by providing a structure in which team-based activities drastically reduce breakdowns, defects and other equipment-related losses.
The result is an environment where people and machines are capable of delivering exactly what customers want, when they want it. The goals of Total Productive Maintenance are:
1) Zero Breakdowns
2) Zero Accidents
3) Zero Defects
Total Productive Maintenance’s team approach brings together production, maintenance and engineering knowledge to assure reliability, maintainability and high performance. TPM prepares operators to do some equipment care independently of the maintenance staff, freeing skilled trades for more specialized activities like preventive maintenance, predictive programs and new equipment planning and design. Concepts for Total Productive Maintenance:
- Autonomous Maintenance
- Focused Improvements
- Planned Maintenance
- Technical Training
- Quality Maintenance
- Early Equipment Management
- Environmental and Safety Management
- Office TPM
We apply the TPM approach developed by Seiichi Nakamura, the father of TPM, adapted to the U.S. culture and enriched with over 14 years of implementation experience. Working in tandem, these strategies provide organizations with a powerful program to create equipment ideal for their production environment -- equipment that is easy to operate, easy to maintain and "right-sized" to aid in establishing flow.
We provide our clients with a Reliability Assessment which is a process of gathering detailed information and data to pinpoint and identify major equipment conditions and key culture issues affecting the productivity of the organization. In collaboration with maintenance and production personnel, our consultants will perform an objective assessment of equipment reliability providing a clear understanding of current state along with recommended improvement opportunities, improvement cost/benefit analysis, an implementation action plan, and the time frame to execute the plan.
Effective Equipment Management is a structured process focusing on reducing the complexity often associated with the operation and maintenance of equipment. One of the eight pillars of Total Productive Maintenance, Effective Equipment Management brings the principles of Lean to the design and manufacture of equipment and consists of four elements:
- Design for Quality Assurance
- Design for Maintainability
- Life Cycle Costing
- Design for Flow Facilities
Most production facilities through the world are not designed for product flow, rather they have evolved over time with equipment placed wherever there was an open space or by similar technology. By designing facilities for flow you will be able to significantly increase the velocity of products through your facility and, increase inventory turns and gain control over your process that you have only dreamed about. Our team has designed hundreds of flow lines/cells and flawlessly implemented them in such a way as to have little to no impact on our client’s production.