In any organization there are many departments that must work closely with other departments. One vital partnership is maintenance and the maintenance storeroom – nothing is more important than getting the right parts at the right time to achieve a high level of maintenance effectiveness. While this partnership is vital, it is difficult to develop and maintain because it requires a high level of discipline and determination by both parties. This article covers the dual responsibilities required to achieve success.

Every year 200,000 people leave the U.S. military service. Now, not all are suited for manufacturing or maintenance careers. I would say a small percentage of them intend to jump right into manufacturing by design. Yet, many end up falling into manufacturing careers after their transition, like I did. Why is that?

In today’s highly competitive markets, organisations are strongly looking to achieve strategic objectives to meet stakeholder needs and smart returns on investment. Managing assets and equipment optimally has become crucial for organisations to stay competitive in today’s global market. Such a demand places enormous pressure on maintenance systems to improve efficiency and reduce operational costs. Therefore, it has become imperative for maintenance managers to adopt tools, methods, and concepts that could stimulate performance growth, minimize errors, and utilize resources effectively to transform the organization into a winner.

Choosing a model for maintenance and engineering projects, problem solving, process improvement or business change scenarios can become confusing with many models on offer. So, how do you get the best out of what is available, and why use just one? 

So, let’s start with my hypothesis that TPM drives all three elements of OEE, namely: machine availability, speed and quality.   Traditionally as a Maintenance Leader and then Operational Excellence (OpEx) leader in paper mills and packaging manufacturing plants, my focus was all about machine availability.  If the machine was running, it belonged to operations and I could focus on writing PMs, improving RCM and building Gantt charts for my next planned outage.  However, experience has taught me that just focusing on availability is missing 2/3 of the opportunity to improve business by not embracing the entire OEE metric through maintenance action.