A Picture is Worth 1000 Words
I believe everyone can relate with the continuing pressure to do more with less, and the ever-increasing level of complexity that today’s equipment, both old and new bring. Having a complete set of easy-to-understand, transferable operating and maintenance instructions for all equipment becomes more imperative as changes take place in the work environment.
Lean manufacturing principles have helped improve reliability of assets while optimizing uptime by identifying preventive maintenance procedures designed to mitigate as many failure modes that they can. Traditionally, preventive maintenance procedures have been either oversimplified or unnecessarily complex.
Oversimplified preventive maintenance procedures lend themselves to missing failure modes and are often ambiguous, relying on sometimes widely varying interpretation by the technician or the planner. Written procedures, which are unnecessarily complicated, are over-communicating the standard of work to be performed and nearly invite steps to be omitted, even if certain sections of the preventive maintenance procedure are deemed necessary.
Combining reliability centered maintenance (RCM), Six Sigma and Lean methodologies, enables a simplified set of procedures or standard instructions to be created that are clearly interpreted and use visual cues that allow for repeat-ability to standards identified and less variability or human error.
Reduce Mistakes | Be Clear | Save Time | Save Money
There are many ways to achieve the simplified procedures, for the purposes of this talk you will need a quality digital camera and to engage resources that know the jobs, the equipment and the environment. There are readily available tools such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint and several open-source word processing and spreadsheet applications you can insert images in to also.
Visual Instructor is one of the tools identified here for standardizing processes to assure consistent quality. The uniqueness of this tool allows for formatting of between one and nine pictures per page and 1 to 2 sentences per picture to illustrate a detailed or even complex preventive maintenance procedure that lends itself to being much like Lego instructions. We’ve included a handy link to the site so you can take a look for yourself.
Regardless of the tool you use, simplicity is the key to its adoption and ongoing use. Don’t assume that the audience reading the document understands how to get from one step to the next. This is where interpretation takes over and mistakes can be made.
Why Involving Your Team Matters
The next key to creating quality standard job procedures is involvement. Collaboration and teamwork can run these through RCM analyses such as: FMEA, root cause analysis (RCA) and kaizen events. The goal is to create user-friendly, visual, repeatable instructions that allow any technician at any skill level to perform the work with the same level of quality each and every time the work is performed.
Every document should include common attributes such as: identification of quality, execution, and verification steps as well as cycle times for each step of the process. If your environment is utilizing lead techniques as well as any Six Sigma characteristics, you may also want to include value-add and non-value-added identification of work as well as identification of the forms of waste (ref. Tim Woods) so that the standard procedures can be reviewed and edited for continuous improvement.
Given that statistically 68% of the the primary causes of equipment failure are infant mortality or failure on startup, standard work procedures that are simple and visual will help to reduce these types of failures. I will qualify that statement by saying it will not mitigate poor components or the fact that the procedure as defined is incorrect. It will however, identify a bad procedure faster, and allow you to find with more accuracy the attributes of the procedure that may be causing failures to occur, thereby allowing your reliability or continuous improvement resources to adjust and/or correct any and all procedures to maintain standard work.