Page 75 - TPM A Route to World-Class Performance

56 TPM-A Route io World-Class Pevformance

create an air flow across the bulb to keep it cool and so stop it overheating. If
the fan goes, the bulb will most certainly blow, and my product, the overhead
view foil, will probably melt in the process! I hadn’t really thought about this
before - mainly because I hadn’t been asked to think about it!
It’s quite interesting, really, because when I started to clean the OHP I
could tell it was getting hot - or overheating, to be precise (because I like to
be precise nowadays). Cleaning is inspection, and I’m really acting as the
ears (sound), eyes (sight), nose (smell), mouth (taste), hands (touch, heat,
vibration) and common sense of my maintenance colleague, Joe Wrench. And
I don’t usually need a spanner or screwdriver to use any of my God-given
senses! Incidentally, I’ve learnt that common sense is in fact quite uncommon
unless we’re encouraged to use it! Anyway, back to the fan, the most critical
part of my machine, the OHP. If, when I’m cleaning it, I notice it’s getting too
hot, or if it starts to make a noise or vibrates, I do one thing, and one thing
only. I switch off the on/off switch, I pull out the plug and bring it back here
to the machine, and then I get Joe to come and see what’s wrong. It’s beyond
my level of competence or skill at the moment to go messing about with the
fan, but I can and do act as the early warning system for Joe.
In fact, Joe and I have thought a lot about the fan and we are getting a bit
more scientific about the early warning system - or condition-based
maintenance or monitoring (CBM) as we call it. Rather than trust my ’feeling
the heat’ or ‘hearing the noise’ senses we’ve decided to drill a hole here in
this precise position and we’ve inserted a thermometer with a red mark on
the 40°C point. So during the shift I do three readings: after one hour, after
four hours, and just before the end of the eight-hour shift. I can trend the
readings and I keep them up on this visible wall chart so that both Joe and I
can see the temperature trends, alongside the major event fault trends. Joe
and I have made two other improvements as well. In fact, we’re quite proud
of these equipment improvements that we‘ve implemented. The fan drive
belts used to break quite often, so I’ve suggested we cut out a 100 mm x 100
mm panel on the side here and put an acrylic cover in place of the metal sheet
we removed, so that we can look inside the OHP base and see if the belt is
fraying before it actually breaks. It’s simple really, and, we think, quite effective.
In fact, all 80 of our other OHP machines are now fitted with the thermometer
and the acrylic cover modifications.
The really exciting bit about this TPM process is when we get to Step 9, the
problem prevention bit - where we need the 5 whys technique to get at the
root cause and prevention routine as to why the bulbs were blowing or
failing. The 5 whys process goes like this:
1 Why is the bulb blowing? Because it’s overheating.
2 Why is it overheating? Because the air flow is insufficient.
3 Why is the air flow insufficient? Because the filter is blocked.
4 Why is the filter blocked? Because nobody cleans it.
5 Why isn’t it cleaned? Because we didn’t appreciate the importance of
daily asset care - apple-a-day routines!!