RELIABILITY Engineer Jack Joyce has written about the potential applications of ‘Kaizen’ to the maintenance process.
While the continuous improvement ‘Kaizen’ concept has been used in the manufacturing industry for some time, it has seen limited use in maintenance. However, it has potential benefits to the sector.
‘Kaizen’ involves finding quick actions to eliminate waste within a process by forming a team of those stakeholders involved in the process, and dedicating the entire team for a short time to find and eliminate wastes and useless actions.
In maintenance, it is often difficult for supervisors to have the same outlook or perspective on a problem as a maintenance technician or an operator. Supervisors might have the bigger picture, while technicians would be in touch with the intricacies of the problem and the different processes in interaction.
While maintenance professionals often search for a root cause to a problem and seek to implement a solution based on this, their effectiveness can be compromised if there are other wastes within the process.
By using ‘Kaizen’ to form a cooperative team between operations and maintenance personnel, a reliability-enhancing process can be analysed to yield further benefits. The proper application of the concept can see benefits when for preventative maintenance procedures and maintenance communication.
