Preventative Maintenance
There are so many meanings for “PM” - Program Manager, Project Manager, the afternoon - but the most relevant for maintaining manufacturing uptime is Preventative Maintenance.
What is Preventative Maintenance you ask? It’s the work you do to take care of equipment and tooling before it breaks, making sure that tools and equipment are always available and working properly whenever you’re planning to use them. Effective Preventative Maintenance is put on a schedule (A “PM Schedule”), for regular check-ins and tuning, similar to changing the oil on your car. You’re not going to wait until the oil is burnt and the engine seizes up to make a change, but rather you are going to have it changed every 3-5000 miles to ensure that your vehicle is always running smoothly. The same is true with manufacturing equipment, and the PM schedule will vary depending on the tool - oil changes, belt tightening, sharpening, and calibrating are a few examples of maintenance items that you’ll want to put on a PM schedule to ensure your equipment is operating effectively and not incurring downtime.
It may seem like taking time away from production to do maintenance is Non Value-added and should be avoided, but it’s critical for a well-run organization. That said, wherever possible you should try to do preventative maintenance activity outside of planned operating time so it does not take away from your build schedule. Do it after the shift, or set up a plan to execute it during lunch breaks with a rolling lunch schedule for whomever is doing maintenance.
As well, if a tool is experiencing significant downtime, a good PM schedule will likely help alleviate the problem. Fix the immediate issue, then put the tools on a schedule for maintenance and stick to it to maintain high levels of uptime. Look to your equipment manuals for any recommended maintenance items and intervals, and put together a plan that will help you maximize uptime.
Finally, for minor items, work to include this into any shift start-up/finish procedures, and for major items, try to break them up into smaller items where possible, or group big items together to be done all at once during a planned shutdown or over a weekend when the operation isn’t planned to run. As well, for major items it’s important to do a validation run before releasing to production - there is nothing worse than bringing in a team to work after maintenance has been done on the equipment, only to find that the it was not successful and the equipment is unable to run as intended.
