Lean maintenance is a proactive, total-plant initiative that strives for planned and scheduled maintenance activities and bottom-line benefits such as increased equipment reliability, uptime, productivity, efficiency, quality and profitability.

The action items for this initiative are lean tools, including:
• Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)
• Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM)
• high-performance, self-directed work teams made up of multi-skilled technicians
• decision logic
• 5-S
• kaizen

The initiative is supported by a distributed, lean MRO storeroom that provides parts and materials on a just-in-time (JIT) basis and backed by a maintenance and reliability engineering group that performs root cause failure analysis (RCFA), failed part analysis, maintenance procedure effectiveness analysis, predictive maintenance analysis, and trending and analysis of condition monitoring results.

Lean maintenance is the missing link in many companies or plants that are embracing the concepts of lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System. Industry research shows that for a typical plant: wrench time is 25 to 30 percent of a maintenance mechanic's workday; "emergencies" constitute 60 to 80 percent of maintenance department work orders; overall equipment effectiveness is 50 to 60 percent; and, a host of major internal roadblocks (including bad data, a lack of goals and a lack of a comprehensive strategy) stand in the way of maintenance work order efficiency and overall organization.

Huge opportunities exist for those plants that bring lean manufacturing concepts into the maintenance department. Get lean by attending "LMU4: Bringing Lean into Maintenance," May 23-25 in Las Vegas.