“You break it, we fix it” is typically how maintenance sees repairs. There’s gainful employment from fixing the same things repeatedly, but that approach doesn’t enhance your career or give your company a competitive advantage.
You don’t have time to analyze every repair, but each month, flag one that if fixed differently (e.g., an equipment modification or root cause repair) will eliminate or reduce either:
- A source of irritation to production workers and/or management.
- A revenue loss creator.
The “frequent flyer” types of failures provide the best opportunity because you don’t have to wait a year for the results of corrective actions to become evident to everyone.
For example, lighting ballasts frequently fail in Area 3 and this annoys workers there. When replacing the next one, ask, “Why did this ballast fail?” Suppose there are five possible answers and one of those is “periodic voltage spikes.” So ask, “Do these happen and why?
Your power analyzer catches regular voltage spikes. Solving for this eliminates one cause of ballast failure, but also a root cause of other equipment failures. You hit a gold mine here.