Arguably the most important of all manufacturing intracorporate partnerships, the relationship between production/operations and maintenance is often a bittersweet accord, in which both teams continually struggle to define their roles. For those who do manage to do so and build a working relationship, the results are often no less than spectacular, being recognized as one of the major hallmarks of a world-class organization.

In order to synergize energy and work together as a unified manufacturing team, both maintenance and production/operations must realize and accept the fact that"maintenance is as integral to the production process as production is to the maintenance process." This statement underpins all of today’s major management methodologies, including Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), Total Quality Management (TQM), ISO 9000, Six Sigma, etc.. The premise is simple in that to achieve maximum equipment availability and reliability, maintenance must be proactive and work with operations to develop an engineered maintenance approach that respects operations’ need to deliver high-quality product at a consistent rate of throughput. This calls for development of a reliability program in conjunction with the operations team, as opposed to

the old approach of building a preventive program in isolation and expecting operations to cooperate without understanding the maintenance process or position.

Maintenance has traditionally been poor at communicating the why and the how of the maintenance process, and is typically considered to be ignorant of operations’ needs. Building a combined proactive approach to reliability allows operations to understand why equipment needs to be monitored and maintained on a regular basis. At the same time, maintenance learns to appreciate problems from the operations side.

Examining the typical complaints from both partners’ perspective can lead a workable approach that allows both departments to focus their efforts on the equipment’s ability to produce consistent product without taxation.

The following represent the top complaints voiced by both maintenance and operations:

1. Operations: "A machine is only broken when it can’t produce parts anymore!"
Maintenance: "Operations will only hand over equipment for scheduled maintenance once it dies."

Solution…
Defining failure is the first task in building a reliability- based approach to equipment management. In TQM and RCM, the key performance measurement for success is Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) that views the relationship of equipment availability, rate of manufacturing throughput and rate of product quality. OEE will suffer terribly if maintenance is not allowed to ensure that the equipment is capable of manufacturing product at its minimum specified rate of product throughput, just as it will if operations continues to operate the equipment in an obvious state of disrepair. Both scenarios adversely affect quality. Setting and defining an agreeable minimum rate of throughput that is well within the design specification of the machine, and working...(Read whole article)