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Published on: October 2007
Type of content: WHITE PAPER
Format: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) (78 kb)
Length: 8 pages
Price: FREE

Overview:
One of the most popular buzz-words in business today is “lean.” This term conveys the idea of fat elimination – the elimination of enterprise waste, the streamlining of processes to increase productivity, and the more efficient use of capital assets and valued personnel in the pursuit of continuously improving bottom lines.

The bulk of leanness authors group maintenance in a bundle with “other processes” and rarely offer tools specifically addressing lean methodologies with respect to the maintenance effort. This lesser valuation of the maintenance process is mirrored by the view of maintenance held by corporate management in general. It is common knowledge that asset downtime disrupts production and drives up both process and per unit operating costs. Executives often lose sight of this because they focus on output, not on the assets used to create it. As one CFO put it, “Companies care about how many widgets they make, not the widget machine.” The irony is that companies can use asset performance management in implementing lean maintenance techniques not only to make more widgets, but to make each widget more profitably.