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One of the more overlooked components to operational excellence in large asset-intensive companies is the efficiency of it maintenance operations. In fact, over the past few decades, few operations management disciplines have changed as much or become as important, particularly as equipment continues to age and fixed asset capital costs rise.
Smart managers know maintenance can impact a company's image, especially those companies that are equipment-dependent, such as air carriers or companies in complex industries for which delays and down time equal cost increases and revenue decreases. Not only are equipment reliability and its exploitation dependent upon maintenance, but the safety and quality of products and services as well.
Fortunately, maintenance effectiveness can usually be achieved through process-based improvement, even in technical manufacturing environments. Lean concepts of work, waste, and failure elimination apply just as well within maintenance as any other part of a business. Plant capacities, process yields, productivity, and customer service can all be dramatically raised through team-based problem solving.
An effective maintenance strategy applies scarce resources where they can provide the most leverage in delivering high capacity at the lowest total cost. But few companies have enjoyed the step changes in performance management resulting from world-class preventive, predictive, and precision maintenance which causes all three curves to shift downward.
Before undertaking maintenance excellence workstreams on an enterprise-wide scale, it is first important to understand and accept that maintenance is an investment that needs to be optimized, not a cost that has to be minimized. It is a process for bringing more profit, not one for saving money. Immediate savings in the maintenance function could lead later to huge human and material losses.
Underperforming companies consider maintenance a process to activate only when something unexpected happens. But when operators first notice signs of equipment impact problems, it is usually too late. The costs associated with lost capacity often dwarf corrective maintenance department expenses. High-performing factories achieving optimized maintenance performance balance key maintenance cost components and drive to the minimum cost.
At Thomas Group, we believe the ultimate goal of a maintenance strategy is to provide maximum useful capacity at the lowest possible cost throughout the entire production system, and that to achieve significant improvements in maintenance effectiveness, companies must move from a tactical to strategic view of maintenance.
Our maintenance offering creates economic value to your operation by
The maintenance effectiveness framework is focused on delivering rapid and sustainable results. Our implementation program focuses on rapidly driving and sustaining maintenance excellence at a plant level, and all of the key maintenance performance drivers are addressed by our equipment specific strategy approach to maintenance. Thomas Group also assists with the critical and expensive operating process of planned shutdowns, and we work with clients to develop a maintenance outsourcing strategy.
We also believe the implementation of strong continuous process improvement is key to sustaining the benefits of a maintenance effectiveness program.