A global ingredient solutions leader had a plant with a demand problem most manufacturers would envy. Because the production lines were oversold, every hour of downtime was an hour of committed volume they'd already committed to but couldn't actually ship.
The downtime concentrated at the palletizers, end-of-line equipment that backs up everything before it. The maintenance organization wasn't built to protect them. How critical an asset was didn't impact how maintenance decisions were made, so the most important machines got the same treatment as the least.
Because of all this, the plant was constantly in firefighting mode. Of 1,763 work orders, 38% were break-in or emergency jobs.
We started by ranking their assets by criticality, emergency work order volume and OEE impact. This allowed us to focus early efforts on the single points of failure, the things that stopped the whole unit.
For the palletizers, we identified the main failure modes and built job plans for the highest-risk failure modes by RPN. We also reviewed the CAPEX initiatives on those assets, and suggested focusing on the reliability work that might make some of them cheaper or unnecessary. And we made criticality the driver of the weekly scheduling meetings to make sure the single-point-of-failure steps got priority.
The design was heavily influenced by the operators. Inspection routes, routines, checklists and schedules were informed by the people closest to the equipment, and ownership was shared by both operations and maintenance.
Last, we helped build capability in the form of data analytics, problem solving toolkits and prioritization techniques.
We went from prioritization to implementation within seven weeks. The improvements were estimated to be worth $0.4M per month, and the share of maintenance hours going to unplanned work fell from the mid-teens to under 9% as downtime on the palletizers dropped.
Seven weeks was possible because we prioritized. Attacking the single points of failure helped them realize genuine ROI within 2 months instead of 2 years. And because the process was standardized, replication to the next palletizer (or other assets) could be reliably executed by the internal team going forward.