[ashishdevikar]

Here is thing that always surprises me; every time i talk to my friends working in Maintenance or Production department they really don't stop complaining and fighting for uptime of machine on which they work.

Men working with Maintenance really have strong point that when they call a machine for a shutdown, they really do a good and a value adding job for the machine. (Well VALUE ADDING: they have a separate definition for it, any job done on machine that would help increase MTBF or decrease MTTR of the machine is termed as Value adding job.) They say this time that spend on the machine should not be counted as the downtime but as lean method time. Considering the Fact that "downtime" is still considered as a Offense one maintenance engineer and his team does here in India; Management pressurizes to reduce it to minimal, and failing that would affect into poor evaluation grades of the team.

The next set of person are the Production department people, who always try to over utilize and over stretch the machine while in Uptime. Result the "Value Added Work" goes waste as the machine goes to breakdown.
They follow the SOP's (Statement of Procedure)in this period and show a increase in the production; so the management doesn't really considers over utilizing as a Offense. But the penalties of Downtime are also paid by the Production team in evaluation. And ask that the increase in production should be seen as the scale of how well the machines and equipments are performing.

Please consider this that above scenario is more or less same for many industries here. What surprises me more is that many of my friend are working for industries which have been already awarded for Lean Methods they follow.

I am trying to ask a single question is WHO is wrong here? The Management, the Production Guys, or the Maintenance guys??
What i can say is the Management uses the awards as advertising stunt (many of times) and they still live and practice the old production trend.

I strongly think that Management should ensure that the lean awards they get are not just shield for shelf but are the proof of cultural change in the industry. And needs to be practice and educated to every level of management.

Please comment back if agree or Dis-agree.