Whenever a new product is designed, the important tasks are the efficiency of the product development and the efficiency of the investment in machinery, together with a process that can produce in volume efficiently — and the product itself must be one customers want. Put another way, the company is developing its competitiveness through a simple production method inside a process free of loss: machines that are easy to run and easy to repair, so that no defective product escapes.
Initial-phase management means attending to the detail when a new product is designed — the product design, the machine design, and the management of production — on the principles of maintenance-prevention design and of life-cycle cost.
The product has to be easy to make first
Production efficiency starts with a product that is easy to produce. Get that right and the problems that follow are fewer — and on some points there is no problem at all.
Designing the machine to prevent maintenance
Designing a machine for maintenance prevention means building in reliability, maintainability, support for autonomous maintenance, operability, economy of resources, safety, and flexibility.
Production management has to consider maintenance too
Production management covers capacity planning, production planning and control, and inventory management. All three can affect maintenance, so maintenance has to be part of the thinking.
Why this pillar is necessary
Good maintenance cannot come about in any complete way if a great many things have gone wrong from the very beginning — the design of the product, the design and layout of the plant, the design or purchase of the machine, and the planning and control of production. Every one of them can obstruct maintenance from being effective.
Maintenance must therefore be considered from the design stage — what is called initial phase management — so that the product is easy to produce, the machine is economically worthwhile, autonomous maintenance is encouraged, and production is managed in a way that fits the maintenance work.
Read next
- FMEA: Prevention Rather Than Cure, and the Ten Steps That Keep It From Becoming Paperwork
- MP Design and Life Cycle Cost
Reference
- ธานี อ่วมอ้อ. การบำรุงรักษาด้วยตนเอง. กรุงเทพฯ: สถาบันเพิ่มผลผลิตแห่งชาติ, 2547.
- ธานี อ่วมอ้อ. การบำรุงรักษาทวีผลแบบทุกคนมีส่วนร่วม. พิมพ์ครั้งที่ 2. กรุงเทพฯ: สถาบันเพิ่มผลผลิตแห่งชาติ, 2546.
- Development Program: Implementing Total Productive Maintenance. Tokyo: Japan Institute of Plant Maintenance, 1996.