Two years ago, a major appliance-maker contracted with your company to manufacture critical components of its high-end models. The addition of two new production lines to handle this tripled the plant’s revenue, but didn’t require extra space, operators, or infrastructure because the new lines replaced low-profit ones.
Unfortunately, maintenance is “constantly” working on these lines; only two maintenance techs out of 30 haven’t worked on these. Equipment problems have resulted in quality issues and late shipments. The appliance-maker threatened to cancel the contract. The plant manager wants you to end the downtime problem.
Where do you start?
One glaring issue is this equipment, so important to the plant’s financial health, is being maintained and repaired by so many different people; obviously, they can’t all be adequately trained on it. Identify at least two people per shift to become trained experts on this equipment, or at least parts of it. For example, send two techs to offsite training on the control system.
Apparently, there’s no tracking of failure modes and responses. If there were, even techs not specifically trained on this equipment would (probably) eventually solve the problems (trained techs would solve them much faster).
