Process Downtime Reduction : How to Minimize Waste from Breakdowns, Set-Ups, Supply Chain Issues, and Staffing Constraints

Among the biggest mistakes manufacturers make is not keeping key equipment and processes running and making saleable product when needed. This situation existed when the author Mike Beauregard began working in manufacturing years ago and it currently remains true in companies ostensibly focusing on Lean. To improve, companies often rely on increasing productivity by making products faster and with more automation, but many fail to focus on the area in which they can get the biggest gains for their efforts – the reduction of downtime.

This book provides readers the techniques they crucially need to keep their critical manufacturing equipment running correctly and efficiently – which increases production, decreases labor costs, decreases breakdown costs, and ultimately increases the bottom line. Downtime in production lines stems from many sources. The contribution might be small for many of those sources, but it adds up.

Downtime and its causes then insidiously become the norm, accepted, unseen by the workforce and the management team. Most training courses and books look at a specific cause of downtime – mainly, either product changeover (set-up reduction) or breakdowns (TPM). This book addresses these two areas and many other sources of downtime including how to decrease downtime caused by supply chain issues, staffing issues, and downtime internal to the processes themselves.

In the final chapter, the author covers how to manage the downtime reduction effort – how to measure downtime, prioritize which downtime sources to attack first, and monitor the improvement.