How Lean Manufacturing Can Result In Happy Customers and Reduced Costs

Does it seem like your maintenance staff is constantly putting out “fires?” Or that your production equipment is always running to failure requiring industrial electronics repair and causing unplanned work stoppages?

Lean manufacturing may be the answer.  Lean manufacturing concepts aren’t new but they are gaining momentum…and for good reason.

By implementing some lean manufacturing strategies, you can track equipment breakdowns, schedule preventive maintenance, and anticipate needs for maintenance parts.   Benefits include:

  • Waste elimination
  • Defect reduction
  • Productivity maximization
  • Engaging  your work force as a team

All manufacturers can benefit from lean strategies; however, mid- and large-size operations benefit most from embedding maintenance personnel with the operators.  Under lean manufacturing, operators conduct daily maintenance inspections from checklists for performance and safety criteria.

The operators, rather than special maintenance staff, clean, inspect and change filters on their machines and check gauges to make sure the equipment is operating correctly.  Operators can then quickly alert maintenance personnel to safety issues or machine problems correcting them immediately.

There are a number of lean tools that can be applied to your maintenance function to improve equipment performance and reliability.  Here are just a few:

  • 5-S (sort, straighten, scrub/shine, standardize, and sustain)
  • Eliminate the “Seven Deadly Wastes” (overproduction, waiting, transportation, processing, inventory, motion and defects)
  • Standardize workflow
  • Value-stream mapping
  • Just-in-time
  • Autonomation (which means quality at the source)
  • Mistake-proofing

Leaning out their maintenance is working for many manufacturers today.  Maintaining your machines in a preventive mode instead of running them to failure helps you meet your customer’s production expectations.  There is tons of information to be found online about each of these strategies.

When your machines are scheduled for maintenance we are there to provide the electronics repair with expert service for power supplies, touch screens, printed circuit boards, test equipment, servo motors, servo drives, spindle drives, AC/DC/VFD drives, cnc equipment, encoders, plc’s stepper motors, and more.