Page 406 - Intro Predictive Maintenance
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World-Class Maintenance     397

                  • Can employee involvement programs work for long if management ignores
                    the pleas to  fix the equipment or get better equipment so a world-class
                    product can be delivered to the customer on a timely basis, thus satisfying
                    the employee concerns and suggestions?

            Proactive maintenance management can help improve reliability, maintainability,
            operability, and profitability, but achieving these goals requires the talents and involve-
            ment of every employee. Through  autonomous activities, in which the operator is
            involved in the daily inspection and cleaning of his or her equipment, companies will
            discover that the most important asset in achieving continuous improvement is people.

            Companies are beginning to realize that the management techniques and methods
            previously used to maintain equipment are no longer sufficient to compete in world
            markets. Attention is beginning to focus on the benefits of proactive maintenance,
            yet the number of companies that have successfully implemented new maintenance
            management methods is relatively small. The reason is that many companies try to
            use tools, such as predictive maintenance, to compensate for an immature or dys-
            functional maintenance operation.  They fail to realize that achieving world-class
            performance is an evolutionary step, not a revolutionary one. To fully understand the
            character of world-class maintenance, it is necessary to consider the evolution of a
            typical quality program.



            18.4 FOCUS ON QUALITY
            In Figure 18–2, the various stages of a quality improvement program are highlighted
            along the bottom of the arrow. In the early days, a company would ship almost any-
            thing to the customer. If the product did not meet customer standards, nothing was
            done about it until the customer complained and shipped it back; however, this
            approach eventually became costly when competitors would ship products that
            the customer would accept because there was no quality problem. Complacency





                              Evolution of Quality Improvement







                        Customer  Inspect  Quality  Operators
                        inspects at  before  department  use SPC  TQC
                        receiving  shipping  uses SPC


                      Figure 18–2 The various stages of the quality maturity continuum.
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