|
Maintenance Efficiency
Strategies
 If
a mold shop supervisor has more molds sitting red-tagged (needing work)
than getting pulled on a weekly basis then is his shop efficient? Probably
not. Will anybody notice? Probably not. So why is maintenance
efficiency important if the molds are ready when needed? Because as
Captain Kirk used to say, “It’s the
final frontier”.
Everything in plastics
manufacturing gets scrutinized today: from the inception of the part, to
the mold design, then the build and finally...production. But
maintenance is normally left wide open…and to the devices of craftsmen
behind the bench.
Common shop issues that
we deal with every day are having costs associated with them so that
they can be measured by the people footing the mold repair bills. To
excel in the game, we must raise the maintenance bar.
How
Do You Begin?
 There is no silver
bullet and we must be careful not to start out making rash decisions
based on perceived issues or unproven facts and innuendo. First you
must choose the parameters that you want to improve, then establish a
baseline of measurable data to use as a barometer.
For this article we
will discuss the first 3 steps of a 6 step process:
Clean-up and
Organize Your Shop
It is hard for anyone to believe that anything will be improved in a
repair shop that looks like a pig-pen. Once the shop is cleaned, take
an hour every Monday morning and keep it that way.
Stop the Bleeding
First, let everyone know that monitoring of mold stop reasons is taking
place and will be measured for change on a monthly basis. The message
should be that accountability begins now.
Access the Damage
Keep it simple. Utilize your CMMS (computerized maintenance management
system) reports or manually count occurrences to find out where you are.
1. Categorize your
Unscheduled Mold Stop Events by:
a. Stop Reason Description
b. Frequency
c. Corrective Action Costs (By Labor, By Tooling and Total)
Let production know you
are monitoring their issues also, and to please let the tool room know
(via IML Sheets, email, W/O’s etc) if there is anything the tool room
can do to help or correct a reoccurring mold stop issue such as parts or
runners sticking, gas burns, non-fills/shorts, finish or problems
requiring extreme process changes/tweaking.
Soon you will begin to
see a decline in unscheduled downtime, which accomplishes several things
quickly:
1. It will allow more
time for you to concentrate on pro-active maintenance
2. It provides
measurable data in which to demonstrate improvement to the
non-believers.
3.
It reduces
operational costs (labor, press down-time)
4. It improves your
ability to meet production quotas and schedules
5. It improves
relations between tooling and process
After compiling the
list of unscheduled mold stop reasons, post them in the tool room and
send an email to process and other concerned teammates concerning your
targets. Many of these will be easily corrected by simply focusing on
them.
The challenge now
becomes how to agree upon an action plan and assign responsibility, as
required, to eliminate or reduce the frequency of targeted stop reasons. |
