Change Management Using PDCA – Understanding the Impact of Unplanned Downtime | Operational Excellence Quick Hits

Speaker 1: (00:05)
In today’s session, we’re going to talk about the impact of unplanned downtime on process performance. Of course, unplanned downtime happens at the worst possible moment. So, it seems like when there’s a lot of pressure to get the process performing, we have unplanned downtime such as a breakdown that stops the process. I’ll talk about the different types of issues relative to unplanned downtime. So, the first one is breakdowns. So, we can look at, there’s functional loss. So, functional loss means there’s a complete loss of equipment function, and that can come in two categories, either sporadic or chronic. So, sporadic means it’s happening infrequently and we don’t know what the possible downtime’s going to be. Chronic is the same issues are happening over and over and over, and they never get fixed. The maintenance step is reactive in nature, and they can just band-aid the situation and get the process up and running and they never get to the root cause.

Speaker 1: (01:06)
There’s also functional reduction loss as a result of breakdowns where we see, where we talked in the last session about running below standard or at partial speed. We have functional reduction loss where you have some partial loss of function and that results in minor stoppages and reduced speed. So, what are the causes of equipment breakdowns? Most causes, 75% of them can be classified into two categories, one, lack of lubrication, and two, contamination. You can see a lot of these issues of equipment downtime, it’s coming from these two facts. So, if we can properly lubricate the equipment and properly clean the equipment so we don’t have contamination, we can significantly reduce the amount of downtime due to breakdowns.

Speaker 1: (02:02)
What’s the traditional maintenance perspective? It’s repairing the equipment after some deterioration in performance. So, we wait till the equipment starts to deteriorate, then we do plan repairs. And typically, the equipment’s in pretty bad shape and we need to take the equipment down and take it out of service to make the plan repairs. And of course, there’s never a good time to do that, so during a shutdown, or when we have to do plan downtime to take the equipment out of service for some period of time. Also, there’s repair of equipment after the breakdown, so these are unplanned repairs and that involves some failure and puts production at risk. And these are also carried out in a panic and are a 100% reactive in nature. And a lot of times we see these two types of maintenance activities going out.

Speaker 1: (02:58)
What we really want to do is look at doing planned maintenance. So, planned maintenance is a proactive approach and there’s two things that are going to happen here, one is decrease of the Mean Time to Repair. So, The Mean Time to Repair is the time to correct the issue once the issue is identified. So, we want to reduce that time from when we identify it to we get it repaired. That also reduces the average cost for repair, reduces workflow interruptions, reduces maintenance over time, reduces emergency purchases and expediting fees, reduces repair parts cost, reduces obsolete spare part inventory, and reduces equipment life cycle costs. There’s also things that will increase as a result of planned maintenance, which is the Mean Time Between Failures. So, this measures a time from a failure to the next failure.

Speaker 1: (03:54)
What we want to do is lengthen the time between failures, then it also will typically increase spare part inventory accuracy, so having the right stuff in the right place at the right time. That also increase equipment availability and equipment repeatable. These unplanned process downtimes, if we just take some simple corrective measures, do some root cause analysis using our PDCA cycle, we can significantly reduce the frequency of these issues and also the life of time that the equipment is down because it’s minor repairs versus major repairs.