A Journey to Visual Factory Maintenance
As anyone knows who has started out on a journey towards a lean manufacturing facility or implemented a thorough 5S program the visual aspect is a fundamental element.
Having a Visual Factory leads to many gains in production, reduction in breakdowns, correct set-up's all through what appears to be straight forward and common sense information displayed in the right places.
Many of us however and I include myself have spend years working on equipment that lends virtually no information to the user be it from a production or maintenance perspective. All of the required information has to be learned or sought from manuals or experts. Worse still, human nature being what it is many people, instead of finding the correct information which takes time and effort, make do with what they assume it should be leading to further potential issues.
When starting out to try develop the visual information in our manufacturing plant particularly on machinery as I am from a maintenance background I looked to see if there was any references that could give guidance or examples to use as training aids. I found though that there seemed to be very little about that give good clear examples. Perhaps there is and if any ones knows of any certainly let me know but that brings us around to the point of this blog. I wanted to try and show real world examples of how manufacturing machines and equipment can be improved particularly in relation to helping for the correct maintenance and care of them.
Hopefully the examples cover a wide range of information and provide useful guidance for those who have not already went down this route. From experience and results taking a small amount of time to establish Visually Managed equipment pays dividends many times over for the rest of the assets life.
If you would like to share or add any of your own examples I would be delighted to add them to the blog. Contact details here
