Page 407 - Intro Predictive Maintenance
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398       An Introduction to Predictive Maintenance

         sabotaged competitiveness. To stay in the game, the company was forced to make
         changes in the way it did business.

         The second step was to begin inspecting the product in the final production stage or
         in shipping just before it was loaded for delivery to the customer. Because this
         approach reduced the number of customer complaints, it was better than before and
         the company realized that it was expensive to produce a product only to reject it just
         before it was shipped. In effect, they were shooting themselves in the foot. It was far
         more economical to find the defect earlier in the process and eliminate running defec-
         tive material through the rest of the production process.

         This led to the third step in quality system maturity—the development of the quality
         department. This department’s responsibility was to monitor, test, and report on the
         quality of the product as it passed through the plant. At first, this approach seemed to
         be much more effective than before, with the defects being found earlier, even to the
         point of statistical techniques being used to anticipate or predict when quality would
         be out of limits; however, there were still problems. The more samples the quality
         department was required to test, the longer it would take to get the results back to the
         operations department. It was still possible to produce minutes’, hours’, or even shifts’
         worth of product that was defective or out of tolerance before anyone called attention
         to the affected piece of equipment.

         Solving this problem led to the fourth step—training the operators in the statistical
         techniques necessary to monitor and trend their own quality. In this way, the phrase
         “quality at the source” was coined. This step enabled the operator to know down to
         the individual part when it was out of tolerance, and no further defective components
         were produced. This approach eliminated the production of any more defects and pre-
         vented rework and expensive downstream scrap; however, circumstances beyond the
         control of the operator still contributed to quality problems, which led to the next
         step—the involvement of all departments of the company in the quality program.

         From the product design phase, through the purchasing of raw materials, to final pro-
         duction and shipping of the product, all involved recognized that producing a quality
         product for the lowest price, the highest quality, and the quickest delivery was the
         company’s goal. This meant that products were designed for productivity; the mate-
         rials used to make the product had to be of the highest quality; and the production
         process had to be closely monitored to ensure that the final product was perfect. The
         company had evolved to the world-class stage of maturity.



         18.5 FOCUS ON MAINTENANCE
         How does this path to maturity relate to the path to maturity for asset or equipment
         maintenance? Figure 18–3 compares the two. In stage 1 of the path to world-class
         performance, the equipment is not maintained or repaired unless the customer (i.e.,
         operations, production, or facilities) complains that it is broken. Only then will the
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