Six Sigma, DMAIC and Lean Maintenance
Posted by: meikah | 25 June 2008 | 9:51 pm
The other day, I heard in the news that an emergency took place in a manufacturing plant, and that the bricks that were holding their kettle scattered.
Because of what happened, their production would be delayed a bit. Although the problem has been contained and they’re now ready to run again, they had just experienced a downtime. Downtime translated in terms of cost and time is expensive, especially in a manufacturing company.
I am sure they have regular TPM or total production maintenance, but I think they would do well with Lean or Six Sigma, too.
I found this article on Feed Forward and it has a good view of how Six Sigma, its tool DMAIC can help in doing a lean maintenance.
Define the problem - Unscheduled equipment malfunctions and the resulting rework, scrap parts, downtime and lost production. Why is this a problem? Because now days the machines and computers do all our work.
Monitor & Measure the problem - Monitor your downtime and measure or calculate what it is really costing… then estimate the potential savings and increased profits that should come from addressing this “problem.”
Analyze how to solve or eliminate the problem - Your maintenance engineer, or an experienced consultant or contract engineer should analyze and identify, for each computer, each machine and each control system how to, in the most cost-effective way, protect or harden the equipment form the above stresses.
Install and Implement - Installation instructions from above should be specific enough that your own maintenance personnel can easily and quickly install the needed protective devices, methods, or changes.
Controlling the project - Controlling Lean Maintenance â„¢ in the future should require little to no effort.
Filed under: Manufacturing, DMAIC, Lean Maintenance, Six Sigma
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SixSig is (Partially) Back!
Posted by: meikah | 25 October 2007 | 8:17 pm
For more than a week, SixSig was down. So un-Six Sigma right? A blog about Six Sigma should have known how to prevent a downtime. 
Well, the downtime hit me right when I was not expecting it, which is usually the case. We all know that downtime can be costly.
In manufacturing, downtime usually occurs during maintenance check of equipment or worse, a sudden breakdown of equipment. This can be prevented by putting a system and corresponding budget for regular maintenance check, which is less costly.
When we talk of maintenance problem, we often hear people say that the problem with downtime is you cannot monitor it, measure it, log it, report it, track it, attack it, or delegate it. But downtime will not go away until you “eliminate it,” that is, prevent it from happening in the first place.
How? Lean maintenance is often recommended.
For websites or weblogs, downtime can be any one of the following reasons:
- the database or host server is down
- some files are deleted by accident
- uploading of files is interrupted, which can be due to Internet connection or the software used in uploading
- an open security hole that allows the site to be hacked
Can these be eliminated? For numbers 1 to 3, yes. As they say, if there’s a will, there’s a way. For number 4, it depends. I think hackers have made it their business to unlock any security there is. As I write, I have yet to restore my other pages, the Six Sigma Interview and Six Sigma Study Guide.
Now what about the cost of the downtime?
Basically if your site is earning per ad impression or clicks, you compute the earnings when the site is up during that same length of time that the site is down.
So for example a page of your site gets 10,000 views a day, then the advertiser pays $1 per 1,000 times their ad is shown, you earn $10 per day. If the site is down for a day, you will lose $10 per advertiser.
That is only a conservative estimate, and not considering the effect of a downtime on the pagerank. Ouch!
Related source:
Lean Maintenance ™ using Six Sigma DMAIC
