Lean Maintenance: A Practical, Step-By-Step Guide for Increasing Efficiency

The book is about applying Lean manufacturing principles to industrial maintenance in order to improve the efficiency and be able to do more with the same (or less) resources. By industrial maintenance we mean the maintenance that takes place in factories and industrial facilities. The book is the result of multiple improvement projects carried out by the authors in various industrial settings and sectors in the past 10 years.The approach works and can be applied in any industry. It yields results without investment. The book is a step-by-step guide that takes the reader through the maintenance process, from equipment failure to finished repair. In each step of the process, the typical inefficiencies are explained and tools are given to improve the process. The book is meant to be used as a guide in an improvement journey. The improvement approach presented in the book is very close to the shop floor and instructs the reader to engage with all team members in the maintenance department in every step of the process, in order to make the improvements sustainable.

If one looks at the main market indexes, between one third and one half of companies on those indexes belong to the industrial sector: automotive, power generation, basic materials, chemicals, consumer goods, et cetera. Those companies spend on average 2 – 5% of plant replacement value per year on maintenance. About one third of this cost is maintenance labor.

The maintenance work that gets done every day in factories around the world is typically inefficient, from a Lean perspective: time is wasted, different tasks are not properly coordinated, job durations are overestimated and job plans, when they exist, are thus "inflated" to cover up the inefficiency.

All this happens because maintenance tends to be the "forgotten" area of efficiency in industrial companies, as much of the improvements are carried out on the (literally) productive areas of the factories. When companies set out to "improve" maintenance, they typically do it through budget cuts that can risk the reliability of the equipment.

The authors believe there is a better way to do more with the same resources through a careful

review of the current way of working and the introduction of Lean.

With this book , the authors try to bring to maintenance managers and practitioners the tools they

need to quickly improve efficiency (in a matter of weeks) without any investment.

Javier Girón Blanco studied industrial engineering with a master’s degree in production engineering at the technical university of Berlin. He worked in the textile and aerospace industries before joining the engineering section of a Toyota Group company in Japan. There he learned about lean manufacturing from the source, and learned the Toyota Production System at different factories in Aichi prefecture. He joined the Operations practice of a global, top-tier management consulting firm in 2004 and led lean improvement projects in the energy, chemicals, automotive and mining sectors in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and South America. In 2012 he started his Operational advisory company. He has worked together with maintenance managers, supervisors and technicians in the last 10 years focusing on improving the maintenance processes and organization. 

Torsten Dederichs started his career 1991 as maintenance electrician in a German open cast lignite mining company. After several years of practical working, he absolved studies in electrical engineering at the university of applied sciences in Aachen/Germany. As maintenance engineer he worked in one of the largest German hard coal fired power stations. During that time, he gained a large view of all aspects of maintenance planning and engineering in a high availability business. Under the face of the rising pressure on the energy business in Germany, he took the chance to support a large-scale lean-transformation project within his company. As maintenance specialist, and later on as project manager, he led the transformation in most of the German based power stations of his company. With his profound maintenance knowledge, he helped to rise the efficiency of the maintenance-processes within these plants significantly. His opinion and knowledge was also sought from the international project-teams. With further ongoing need for transformation in European energy business, his company decided to enter the market as a consultant for power generation specific topics. Here, Torsten Dederichs now works in a central function to develop and deliver consultancy services for energy business, worldwide.