One good thing about a long career is exposure to a few world class mentors. One such person, was a long term professional consultant. He made a good living selling world class benchmarks. His expertise was equipment maintenance and his silver bullet was planning and scheduling.
Any business that employs equipment suffers breakdowns and the associated high costs. If you can not produce, you can't make money. Lower quality and lower returns on investment are typical from surprising events.
There is significant cost savings to be had from fixing problems pro-actively. If you grease a bearing, it doesn't sieze, the shaft doesn't get undercut, the sprocket doesn't jam and cause the chain to buckle and the motor doesn't burn up. It's a lot like the fable of the horshoe nail. The kingdom is lost for want of a horse shoe nail.
Without being clairvoyant or having a crystal ball, how can you predict such failures? There are a lot of easy things to begin with. Most manufacturers give recommended maintenance periodicals based on data. All that typically requires is tracking the number of hours of useage.
Going beyond the basic scheduled maintenance requires a bit more effort. There are very many modern and sometimes expensive techniques for predictive maintenance. Infra-red cameras, vibration monitors, lubricant analysis, mega-ohmeters, ultra-sonic detection, and analytical computer programs just to name a few. Maybe everybody can not cost justify such equipment, but you can examine the purpose of these tools to reveal some basic indicators.
Heat, vibration, and sound coupled with a general familiarity with a machine can go a long way. Frequent inspections with your eyes, ears, nose, and touch are often times sufficient. The goal is to identify and quantify a problem so it can be managed before it becomes more significant. The more you can manage pro-actively, the greater your cost advantage is going to be.
I had the good fortune of spending an entire week in training with an expert. "Planning and Scheduling" was the topic of the classes. The purpose of this lofty venture was to gain a competitive advantage by continually improving at fixing problems efficiently and timely. This would result is lower cost of production and increased profits over competitors that simply run to failure.
One very important theme was measuring. You can not objectively manage what isn't measured. To measure our progression, we kept records on how well the actual results matched our plans. The main metric ended up being scheduled time. We planned and scheduled events breaking them down into ever smaller actions and each action had an allotted time to perform. After a scheduled maintenance event, we'd compare actual numbers to the plan.
We had regular Planner/Scheduler meetings to share and discuss our results and upcoming events. In the beginning, I was head of the class with actual time predictions in the 90 percentile. The remaining half dozen planners all came in around 70-80%.
At first, the others belittled my achievements:
"Yeah, he's got great numbers but he has the smallest crew."
"He's cheating by doing a lot of his own scheduled work!"
Some of my extra efforts started to catch on. I tried to implement every concievable idea that would prevent a task from taking longer. I personally checked inventory of parts. I used penetrating oil on parts that were to be taken apart later. I would secure specialty tools in advance to guarantee availability. I had face to face discussions with individuals of my crew fishing for ideas to streamline our work.
The more effort that went into stomping out and refining details, the smoother everything went. Workers were happier knowing more of what to expect. The jobs didn't go into overtime. Costs were lowered and production schedules were more reliable.
