RCM studies on LEAN bottlenecks?

RCM and LEAN

Do they mix or are they like Oil and Water?

RCM studies are a pain - usually because they take so much effort and so many steps that it is common they often never finish. When a cool tool comes along to make that process easier - well even "easy?", that is worth blogging about.

LEAN guys and gals profess you need to reduce WIP, expose rocks, push faster harder be more responsive to the market.

RCM studies all too often are not performed where they matter. They are time consuming processes, that sometimes never actually finish - wasting a lot of time money and effort.

LEAN often exposes too many "Rocks in the Creek" - those rocks being the inherent and maintained reliability of the assets, and when we remove WIP (Work in process buffers between machines) that help to smooth over the impact of breakdowns and lower reliability, we expose the true reliability of each machine.

The goal of a RCM study is to produce the best maintenance strategy for that asset, and THEN implement that strategy. All too often the strategy development never gets into the hands of the value add technicians, and thus we deliver little or no value from the RCM effort to our process.

Only when we complete the RCM journey can we "reliably expect to be successful in draining the creek to  go LEAN."

Going LEAN to expose the inherent reliability (the reliability of the machine no amount of maintenance can make better) is just fools play, and is the reason many LEAN implementations fall over, resulting in late deliveries, lost sales, and EBIT challenges associated with refilling WIP buffers to a strategic level.

Simple Tank, Pump and Filter Availability and Capacity Model

When we combine the power of RCM and LEAN,  with Availability and Capacity Modeling we engage an incredibly powerful tool set that helps use identify where the bottlenecks in our production processes are easily exposed, and more importantly we can FOCUS our RCM efforts on the bottleneck where high quality maintenance results in higher throughput, allowing greater sales from teh same asset base, and thus increases EBIT.

The combined model of RCM generated Maintenance task instructions, with LEAN WIP buffer modeling and EBIT impact cost reporting puts into ONE tool, the value and focus ability that most LEAN managers wish they had.

Identify your bottleneck, build the RCM, Availability Capacity and EBIT model.

1. Evaluate your current maintenance practice
2. Evaluate the capacity improvement by installing an optimize RCM Maintenance strategy
3. Evaluate how to improve the inherent reliability of the bottleneck through various options;
1. Redundancy in specific areas.
2. Redesign of critical parts of machine generating the most LEAN resistance.
4. The model your WIP buffer and tune it to the optimal strategic level using a combined model.

Once you are done, you have the full team focused on bottleneck breaking using the worlds best tool set for LEAN and RCM.


Then you must put those new maintenance strategies into practice.

The combination of Isographs Availability Work Bench and ARMS Reliability Integration tool allow you to nearly one click produce load sheets for your CMMS and Word documents with pictures for your Document management System work  instruction files.

Read more about it here:
http://www.thereliabilityblog.com/2012/09/20/implementing-the-outcomes-of-rcm/