FDM - November 2006

Getting lean

A piece of equipment may not have demand every minute of the day, but it has to be ready to work the minute there is demand. That’s where TPM

comes in. Companies that employ the TPM program have assigned responsibilities for the maintenance technician and the equipment operator.

The operator is responsible to clean, lube and inspect the equipment on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. This frequent interaction with the equipment is intended to alert the operator to possible reliability

issues that need attention from the maintenance technician.

The maintenance technician is responsible to perform the manufacturer-recommended preventive maintenance checks. Together they create a formidable team that can eliminate the waste of defective product due to faulty equipment.

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Lack of ownership

The final point sums up all the other reasons for defective product — lack of ownership and responsibility on the part of the person performing the task. If your company uses tollgate inspection to keep the manufacturing operation in check, you may unknowingly be contributing to the waste of defective product while trying to maintain conformance. You may have to think about that statement for a minute.

The reason I make that observation is because tollgate inspection removes ownership and responsibility from the person performing the value-adding task. That person may be sending questionable product through the process, thinking someone else will catch it if it’s really bad, and if the work doesn’t come back it must have been okay. That’s a bad assumption because the inspector may not even check that part, and then the operator’s assumption establishes a new acceptance criteria for him or her.

How can you increase operator ownership and responsibility? The person performing the task has to understand that he or she is the last person to see the work before it passes to the customer, and that he or she will be held accountable for any nonconformance.

Evaluate what the tollgate inspector is doing and transfer that knowledge to the person responsible for the task. I believe you’ll see a marked reduction in nonconformance when each person accepts ownership and responsibility for the work they perform, and are held accountable accordingly. ▲