Our Process Services

Most companies are stuck with inefficient and ineffective preventive maintenance strategies and programs.  This current state leaves plant and facility managers asking, “Who PM’d this last?”

Our approach to breathing life in to exhausted PM plans that return little for the effort is the revitalization process of Preventive Maintenance Optimization (PMO).  Through the PMO process, your assets will now receive the best strategic proactive maintenance attention and strategies will be developed to address chronic failures and equipment issues.

Typical results show an average of 20% less in off-line PM time requirements; netting more operational time.  Additionally, PMs will be focused on failure modes and not failures; resulting in the identification of failures in the process of failing with time to plan and schedule corrective maintenance.

Predictive Maintenance is expensive.  Contracting this service out is costly, so is supporting it in-house.  The worst way to adopt a predictive approach is to think that you ‘have to.’  The compelling angle is to develop a strategy that clearly lays out the path to Predictive Maintenance (PdM) as the best means to determine equipment and component conditions.

Our approach is to determine the current proactive maturity of an organization and determine when and where predictive technologies best fit.  In addition to developing the strategy to deploy this technical thinking, we also help clients develop a scope of work and evaluate potential PdM suitors; if the service is to be contracted out.

Value Added vs. Non-Value Added.  Our approach in evaluating systems and processes (even maintenance activities) is to conduct a product process flow and/or a value stream map.  Once the current state is clearly identified, then the fun begins.  Where can the client’s talents be better used than to be negatively impacted by the traditional seven forms of waste:

• Over Production
• Waiting
• Transporting
• Over Processing
• Inventory
• Excess Motion
• Defects

Seiichi Nakajima coined the phrase ‘Total Productive Maintenance’ in 1972 in his book by the same name.  The rebuilding of Japanese industry after the war (WW II) brought to forefront an obvious problem, namely, “Who was going to maintain all the new factories with most of the working age men gone?”

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) can be correctly summarized in the simple phrase, “We are all responsible for the equipment.”  The hard truth is that in today’s manufacturing and service industry, the work itself is capital intensive; meaning that a machine is doing the work.  As such, all the members of an organization owe their very paycheck to the reliable and proper operation of the company’s capital assets.

We help organizations determine how to work smartly in this new reality.  Clearly the owner/operators of the equipment have a role to play.  What is it?

Our approach to TPM includes:

• Getting maintenance right
• Engaging the operational workforce in asset care (Autonomous Maintenance)
• Skills and knowledge enhancement
• Solving chronic issues
• Equipment design improvement (early design)

Reliability, is an equipment-centric definition, and has to mean that the machine does what it’s supposed to do, when it’s supposed to do it, for as long as it’s supposed to do it.  With this street definition in mind, equipment reliability has to be gauged in MTBF, or Mean Time Between Failure.

Our approach is to developed extremely passionate clients bent of increasing the MTBF of an asset and its components.

The storeroom and the concern for spare parts in general is singularly the most crucial element of today’s maintenance and reliability efforts.  Most companies have figured out, or soon will, that access to spare parts is creating a stranglehold on our abilities.  We must do something about this, now!

Our approach is to assess the current strengths and opportunities that exist in active storerooms today, and develop comprehensive strategies to get better, quickly.

All maintenance storeroom processes are developed up through supply chain management.  Maintenance Innovators, Inc. is also ready to take over and run your storeroom operations freeing your limited manpower to concentrate of delivering world class execution. 

Simply put, we offer an extensive level of complete asset management from cradle to grave on capital equipment and facilities management.  This expertise is often not a category that leaned out organizations can bring to the job.  We’ve got you covered.

Our experience has been developed from simple equipment removal to $100 million plant construction.  No job is too big or too small.

There are 10 primary maintenance processes and 28 primary storeroom processes.  To be consistent and consistently successful, the maintenance and storeroom organizations must follow a process designed to ‘lead’ to excellence.  To that end, Maintenance Innovators, Inc., has developed templates for each of these processes.

Our niche is using these templates as a guide, and tailoring effective processes to meet your capabilities and culture.  A process is designed to give us a clear and efficient route to what we want to accomplish.  This means a process has to be documented (written down) and everyone trained to that process.  Measures have to be in place to help guide associates along the path.

This is what we do!

29 CFR 1910.119 is not a suggestion.  If you fall under OSHA’s PSM directives, chances are that you already know how important this federal regulation really is.

We are experienced in developing complete PSM programs and auditing existing programs.  All this effort is bent towards not just making sure your company is in compliance, but rather that your organization is safe and your process to guarantee safety is strong and proactive.

World-Class levels for maintenance planning and scheduling dictate that to reach this high-water mark, your organization should return efforts that 95% of all your maintenance activities are ‘planned’ in advance (there is a definition as to what ‘planned’ means) and that >90% of your maintenance schedule is complied with, on time.  Unplanned and unscheduled work is 3-4 times more expensive and unreliable.  We don’t do our best work in a crisis, we do our most creative work.  We don’t want creative work.

We build high performing maintenance planning and scheduling processes.  We help to vet, train, and grow exceptional planners and schedulers.  This is fundamentally the most important job in maintenance and reliability.  The planner’s #1 job is to increase the utilization of the maintenance workforce.

Be honest.  You don’t have a maintenance and reliability strategy.  Not to worry, you’re right there with everyone else.  This is a significant and paralyzing issue with manufacturing and facilities practices around the world.  We just don’t have a real strategy to build the highest level of executable maintenance and reliability.

We deploy a very basic and repeatable process to developing, fielding, and coaching to a successful maintenance and reliability strategy.  We start with a comprehensive audit of abilities and opportunities.  That is followed up with a strategy meeting where we deploy the Balanced Score Card tool. 

In short, our approach is guaranteed to link corporate financial and performance objectives with product and service creation and continued maintenance and reliability support.  It’s effective, tried, and very powerful.

“Even if you know where you’re going, you’re still lost if you don’t know where you are.”  Truer words have never been written.  The purpose of a maintenance and reliability audit is to establish exactly where you are on the continuum of continuous improvement.  If you’re not truthful and aware of your starting point, where will the energy and need come from to move upward?

The auditing process consist of maintenance and operations observations, financial studies (reliability values), maintenance metrics reviews, interviews and a storeroom assessment.  This process has been described as a full body physical.  It is not meant to be pleasant, rather it is meant to be a thorough level of discovery.

The result is the input to the maintenance and reliability strategic planning service.

Most organizations begin to feel like the base-ball farm team for the big leagues.  Your company spends the time and training to get skilled workers up to a level of competence and they end up leaving to another company; taking their talents (that you paid for) with them.  Does this describe your circumstance?

What if you don’t train them and they stay?

Our approach to maintenance training is to develop a complete listing of what a skilled worker needs to know to work in your operation.  From that, we assess how well the workers know how to perform the tasks that we’ve outlined together.

To complete the initial work, a gap analysis is conducted and reported.  This (the gap) is what we need our training program to ‘close,’ and this takes time and a structured approach.

Our training development strategy concludes with a step by step plan to close this knowledge gap.  Here’s a hint:  this isn’t just for maintenance, it is just as applicable for operators.

The developed history and accomplishments of all our associates have been impactful with in-person testimonials and motivational presentations to work groups and professional organizations.  All our public and private speaking engagements are expertly coordinated through our business development manager. 

Topics include:

• Maintenance and Reliability, where we are and where we’re going
• Equipment Design Excellence, the reasons we don’t do this better
• Cultural Change, how you can’t change culture
• Overcoming the resistance to change, resistance creates heat
• Motivation and getting your associates to be engaged
• Stop managing and start being a leader

Other 3^rd party storeroom contractors promise your accounting department big savings that is their ‘hook’ into getting a foot in the door with you.  After they establish themselves as ‘the’ provider then you’ll notice the quality of their work begin to suffer, and the quality of the parts they purchase to wane.

We approach storerooms with one focus−equipment reliability.  From more reliable equipment comes greater production and less expense, netting the savings or increase in profits expected with other storeroom providers.

We know maintenance and we know storerooms.  Trust you storeroom operations to us and you’ll see the maintenance-storeroom partnership you’ve been promised.