Setting up your maintenance workshop
More often than not, in Chinese plants, the maintenance workshop is a disappointing sight. The place is likely to be a dull, messy, dirty room, with an old lathe, a broken drill and a few outdated pieces of paper lying around. A place where maintenance workers seldom enter – and who would blame them?
Instead, the maintenance workshop should be both the “command center” of the maintenance activity and one of its main “battlefields”: the place where work is prepared, launched, to a large extent executed but also a place (if not the workshop proper, the adjoining office or meeting room) to analyze breakdowns and hold regular meetings.
Just like any other workspace, the workshop should be designed with people in mind, to provide an efficient, enjoyable and safe working environment. It doesn’t have to be a closed space: at one of our automotive customers’ the maintenance workshop is actually one of the island on the shop floor, making work-in-progress visible to everyone, ensuring smooth, unhindered, communication with production. The workshop itself should to be tidy and clean (to drive the point across, the workshop may be equipped with its own dedicated broom).
An important feature of a good workshop is the information board. Our recommendation is to display as little “static” information as possible (such as clear safety reminders) and to focus instead on simple indicators updated on a daily basis. This would usually include overall performance indicators (number of breakdowns, downtime, etc.) as well as ongoing activities (current improvement actions, planned preventive job for the week, etc.). The information board must be highly visual, for example the most critical breakdowns of the week could be shown in a Pareto chart to instantly drive people’s attention to the issues at hand. A constant reference for the maintenance team in its daily work, the board will also serve as backdrop for the daily meeting (with everyone standing in front of the board and the team leader commenting).
Indispensable complement to a good information board, direct access to the CMMS should be available from desktop PCs (large robust screens and keyboards), preferably with a touch-screen panel (if your CMMS supports it, which unfortunately is not likely… our COSWIN does) in the repairing area. The touch-screen panel will allow quick reporting of work-in-progress and access to online documentation (e.g. the correct bolt tightening sequence for a gearbox case). At some of our customers, urgent Job Requests raised in COSWIN trigger a beacon light and siren in the workshop – having said that, we remain strong supporters of using an old-fashioned phone for urgent jobs!
More generally, all technical documentation should be available at the maintenance workshop (not locked forever in the HR department “because suppliers’ documentation is expensive”, as we too often see), either electronically (if easy access is provided in the CMMS) or physically sorted in shelves in the workshop’s technical library, tagged with relevant codes (cross-referenced in the CMMS, for example in equipment sheets).
For the repair area itself, keep in mind this is where a lot of the work is actually performed: the maintenance department’s job is not to run to the machines and work on them endlessly, typically resulting in major downtime. Attention should be paid on the ergonomics of workstations: make sure the workbenches (yes, you need to purchase workbenches or build you own; in any case it is money well-spent) are at the right height. A good reference would be 5 cm above elbow-level for precision jobs (e.g. the assembly of electronic components) and 20 cm above elbow-level for more physical tasks (so people can push easily downwards). Tools specific to a workbench should be stored next to it. We recommend hanging tools in shadow-boards in order to immediately identify when a tool is missing and preparing clearly-identified toolboxes and PPE kits.
The dull and disorganized workshops we too often see are sad testimonies of where the maintenance department belongs at many companies: somewhere in the basement, out-of-sight. The excuse that “our people are in the plant working closely with operators, TPM-style” often doesn’t pass the most basic check (very high breakdown rates, team operating in permanent firefighting mode). On the contrary, a well-set, tidy, busy maintenance workshop, with a clear information board and a technical library, sends a clear message to all involved: “we are preparing our job before execution”, “we rely on standard exchanges and workshop repairs to lower the impact of failures on production”, “we analyze breakdowns on a regular basis”. In a nutshell: “maintenance is under control”. Such a workshop is also a clear and unambiguous statement that the company values the work of the maintenance department and cares for its people.
Tags： workshop
