Pilar
Autonomous Maintenance

The need for autonomy

The need for enhancing operator's competencies soon raised, as the sophistication and complexity of the equipement to use raised. Not only the proper use of the resources require a higher grade of knowledge, but also the way to maintain them in an operational state, to take care about a costly equipment, through proper and regular tending.

Additionally, production stoppage have growing economical and logistic impacts, as more firms go the just-in-time way and becoming sensitive links in a global supply chain, which performance is more than often related to the upstream suppliers'.
A production stop is not only impacting the unit itself, but may expose it to additional penalties from customers.

In order to reduce indirect costs, many firms farmed out all or part of maintenance, loosing great share of know-how and becoming dependent upon their subcontractor.
Transfering simple tasks from the maintenance team to production operators themselves allows keeping expertise required tasks or high added value tasks for maintenance experts, reviewing the maintenance staff number, hence optimizing costs.

Taking into account oerators' motivation, skills and points of interest is an important factor for developing autonomy, as well as understanding that performance of a machine is in fact the result of a man-machine combination. To make this combination efficient, man has to be motivated, involved et able, aware of the stakes and encouraged to take initiatives to keep and improve performance.

From the traditional organization split between users (production) and tenders (maintenance), the new thinking way is focusing on polyvalent teams made of users and tenders, skills idealy found in the same persons.

Maintenance done by users

Autonomous Maintenance is an activity performed by operators, users of their production machines. Basically, AM means maintain machines in a state of tidiness and readiness by insuring:

• Cleaning and inspections to detect abnormalities and possible malfunctions
• Current tending
• Diagnostic, repair and/or facilitate maintenance experts operations
• Measure and follow-up of operations (data capture and recording, audits, failure rate survey...)
• Optimization of procedures, work guides, etc.

Main benefits

The main benefits sought by developing autonomous maintenance are:

• respond swiftly in case of malfunction
• develop the stand-alone (autonomy) of night shifts, week-end shifts...
• involve, empower and motivate operators (see also empowerment and job enrichment)
• free techs and experts from maintenance team for working on preventive maintenance, high complexity problem solving, continuous improvement, etc.

Beyond simply maintenance, the most recent concept of this pilar favors autonomous management meaning managing all activities for a more efficient use of equipment and machines:

• Manage measurement, analysis and actions for keeping and improving performance level
• "Organisation" of the availability and readiness
• Management of supplies, tools and ancillaries