The maintenance problem
Too many times, in lean manufacturing and other lean environments, 10- to 40-year-old equipment is re-deployed, moved and organized into lean cells without adequate concern or attention to maintenance reliability. In a lean cell, unscheduled equipment downtime usually costs 10 to 20 times what the same equipment downtime costs in old traditional batch processing or functional departments. For example, before “lean” we quoted CNC machine tool downtime at $250–$750 per hour for a single 3- to 5-axis CNC machine or robot. Today, automakers with well-configured lean manufacturing plants quote machine tool or robot downtime costs at $2,500 to $5,000 per hour. That is, until a painting robot misses doing its 7th or 8th car. Then the factory is backed up and downtime cost jumps to $3,350 per minute ($201,000 per hour).

As a maintenance engineer for John Deere Co. in the 1970s, I was highly motivated by downtime figures of $250–$750 per hour. By avoiding 4-6 hours of downtime, I had saved the company my month’s salary. I was motivated to find ways to avoid, reduce or eliminate downtime, wherever I could. How much more motivating is lean maintenance reliability today?

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