While some traditional maintenance approaches drain resources and can even contribute to unexpected equipment failures, lean maintenance offers a systematic approach to eliminating waste from maintenance processes. In other words, lean maintenance helps teams work smarter, not harder.
Here's how to set up lean maintenance principles in your facility, from identifying common sources of waste to measuring improvements.
Key takeaways
- Lean maintenance focuses on systematically removing waste from all maintenance processes to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase equipment reliability.
- The eight common areas of waste in maintenance include defects, overproduction, waiting, non-utilized talent, transportation, inventory, motion, and extra-processing.
- Success with lean maintenance involves standardizing work procedures, organizing the workspace with 5S principles, and empowering your team to identify and solve problems.
- Using a computerized maintenance management system is critical for lean maintenance because it helps teams digitize workflows, track key performance indicators, and drive continuous improvement across your facility.
What is lean maintenance?
Lean maintenance means cutting waste and inefficiency from your maintenance processes. When you apply lean principles to equipment and physical assets, you make everything faster and cheaper.
Consider a conveyor motor at a food processing plant that technicians check weekly. Week after week, technicians inspect the motor and find it running normally. This preventive maintenance prevents unexpected failures, which is important.
However, excessive inspections waste technician time that could be better-used elsewhere. Lean maintenance principles involve eliminating excessive maintenance procedures and removing any unnecessary steps from your maintenance practices.
This includes ensuring that spare parts are available whenever they’re needed, ensuring everyone knows where you store tools so they avoid wasting time searching for them, and digitizing work orders so people know who does what in the event of a breakdown.
Types of maintenance waste
Defects
Defects in maintenance include any rework, incorrect repairs, or maintenance-induced failures that require additional time and resources to correct. Every time technicians don't do a job right the first time, it creates waste and increases the risk of unplanned downtime.
Overproduction
This form of waste occurs when you perform maintenance more frequently than necessary. Examples include excessive preventive maintenance checks on equipment that’s proven to be reliable.
Waiting
Waiting is one of the most visible forms of waste. This happens when technicians are idle while they’re waiting for parts to arrive, for someone to shut down equipment, for instructions, or for another technician to finish a task. Each minute spent waiting is a loss of productive time.
Unutilized talent
This waste occurs when you fail to engage technicians in problem-solving and process improvement. Limiting their role to just executing work orders prevents you from tapping into their expertise to make the entire operation leaner.
Transportation
Excessive movement of tools, spare parts, and personnel around the facility is transportation waste. This happens when you have a poorly organized stockroom, decentralized tool storage, or inefficient planning that requires technicians to make multiple trips to complete a single job.
Inventory
While some spare parts inventory is necessary, excess inventory is a significant waste. It ties up cash, requires storage space, and increases the risk of parts becoming obsolete or damaged. A lean approach focuses on having the right parts, in the right quantity, at the right time.
Motion
Motion waste refers to any unnecessary movement a technician makes during their work. This includes walking to find a tool, searching for information in a manual, or reaching for parts in a disorganized workspace. Optimizing the work area reduces this type of waste.
Extra-processing
“Extra-processing” includes any steps in a maintenance workflow that don’t add value. This could be redundant paperwork, multiple approval layers for a simple work order, or generating reports that no one reads. Streamlining these processes frees up time for more important work.
Benefits of lean maintenance
Your biggest win with lean maintenance will be a stronger bottom line. Here's how that looks:
Reduced costs
Every maintenance activity has a cost. It can be the cost of equipment that you could use elsewhere, or the cost of staff spending time on excessive maintenance.
Lean maintenance helps you save on resources, reduce production losses, decrease downtime, and ensure throughput stays at an optimal level.
Better output
Eliminating unnecessary maintenance practices allows your workforce to take on more productive tasks. Because workers are no longer carrying out unnecessary inspections or spending excessive time looking for spare parts or tools, they have time to accomplish production and maintenance tasks that directly maximize output.
Examples of lean maintenance practices
Applying lean principles to maintenance is about taking practical steps to eliminate waste. Here are some common examples of lean maintenance in action:
5S workplace organization
The 5S methodology (Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain) is a foundational lean practice. You can apply it to your tool cribs, workshops, and spare parts storage. By creating a clean, organized environment, you’ll help your technicians find what they need quickly.
Total productive maintenance
Total productive maintenance (TPM) involves empowering equipment operators to perform basic maintenance tasks like cleaning, lubrication, and simple inspections. This frees up skilled maintenance technicians to focus on more complex repairs and proactive reliability improvements. The approach also increases operators' ownership of their equipment.
Standardized work procedures
Creating clear, standardized procedures for common maintenance tasks ensures that technicians can perform every job correctly and efficiently, every time. You can use a CMMS to attach digital checklists, photos, and manuals directly to work orders. This makes it easy for your team to follow best practices and reduces the risk of defects.
Just-in-time inventory
Instead of holding a large, costly inventory of spare parts, a just-in-time (JIT) approach focuses on ordering parts only as you need them. This requires careful planning and strong supplier relationships, but significantly reduces inventory waste. A CMMS helps you track parts usage and set automated reorder points to make JIT inventory management more effective.
How to set up lean maintenance in your facility
Rolling out lean maintenance means taking a methodical look at your operations to eliminate waste. You can build lasting lean maintenance programs by following steps that tackle both technical processes and company culture.
Moving to lean maintenance will take time, but the continuous improvements deliver results.
1. Get buy-in and communicate the vision
Before making changes, make sure everyone (from leadership to frontline technicians) understands why lean maintenance matters. Explain how reducing waste will make their jobs easier, improve equipment reliability, and contribute to the company's success. A shared vision drives change.
2. Identify and map your maintenance processes
Choose a key maintenance process, such as your work order workflow or preventive maintenance program. Map out every step from start to finish. This visual map will help you and your team identify bottlenecks, redundant steps, and opportunities for improvement.
3. Target and eliminate waste
Using your process map, identify the “eight wastes” within your workflow. Are technicians waiting for approvals? Are they walking across the plant to get a common tool? Prioritize the biggest sources of waste and brainstorm practical solutions with your team to eliminate them.
4. Set up lean tools and standardize work
Begin setting up lean practices like 5S to organize your workspace. Create standardized work instructions for your most common tasks and make them accessible through a mobile CMMS. This ensures consistency and provides a baseline for future improvements.
5. Use a computerized maintenance management system to drive efficiency
Knowing where your assets stand at any given time is essential. A CMMS like MaintainX is designed for this. Whether you're looking to carry out root cause analysis, define your metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), or organize your standard operating procedures, MaintainX streamlines lean maintenance directly from your mobile device.
MaintainX helps you manage workflows by allowing you to create, assign, and oversee work orders in real time. The instant messaging feature saves time that might otherwise be spent walking from one department to another, or figuring out who’s in charge of what. Access to MaintainX's Global Procedure Library also ensures maintenance teams stay updated with your organization’s latest best practices.
6. Foster a culture of continuous improvement
Lean is not a one-time project; it’s an ongoing mindset. Encourage your team to constantly look for small improvements they can make every day. Celebrate successes, learn from failures, and empower everyone to contribute to making your maintenance operations more efficient.
How to measure lean maintenance success
So how do you know if your lean maintenance efforts are working? Track the right KPIs.
Measuring performance helps you prove improvements, justify efforts to leadership, and spot new areas to optimize.
Here are essential KPIs to track your lean maintenance success:
CMMS software automatically captures the data you need to track these KPIs and measure your lean maintenance progress:
- Real-time dashboards: Monitor performance metrics as they happen across your facility
- Team visibility: Share results with technicians, supervisors, and plant management
- Data-driven decisions: Use concrete metrics to guide continuous improvement efforts
- Proven results: MaintainX customers achieve an average 32% reduction in unplanned downtime by combining lean principles with modern maintenance technology
The final word on lean maintenance
Lean maintenance changes how you handle equipment reliability and cost management. By systematically eliminating waste from maintenance processes, you reduce unplanned downtime, lower operational costs, and empower your technicians to work more efficiently.
MaintainX provides mobile-first CMMS software that makes lean maintenance principles practical for frontline teams. With features designed for asset-intensive industries, you can digitize workflows, track KPIs in real-time, and drive continuous improvement across your entire operation.
Ready to start your lean maintenance journey? Sign up for free and see how MaintainX can help you eliminate waste and boost production capacity at your facility.
Lean Maintenance FAQs
What is the difference between lean maintenance and total productive maintenance in manufacturing facilities?
Lean maintenance is a comprehensive philosophy focused on eliminating all types of waste from maintenance processes across your facility. Total productive maintenance is a lean maintenance strategy that gets production operators involved in basic maintenance tasks like cleaning and lubrication. This frees skilled technicians for more complex repairs and reliability improvements.
How can maintenance managers get technicians to adopt lean maintenance practices in industrial plants?
Success starts with involving technicians in waste identification and solution design. When your team helps create more efficient workflows, they embrace the changes more readily. Provide mobile CMMS software that simplifies their daily tasks rather than adding complexity to their routines.
What is the most cost-effective first step for setting up lean maintenance in a manufacturing plant?
Start with 5S workplace organization in one specific area, such as your main tool crib or highest-priority production line. This requires minimal budget but delivers immediate efficiency improvements and builds momentum for broader lean maintenance initiatives across your facility.
How does computerized maintenance management system software support lean maintenance strategies for maintenance, repair, and operations?
Modern CMMS software eliminates maintenance waste by digitizing paper-based work orders, automating preventive maintenance scheduling, streamlining parts inventory management, and providing real-time performance data. This allows your maintenance team to focus on more valuable repair work instead of administrative tasks.
The MaintainX team is made up of maintenance and manufacturing experts. They’re here to share industry knowledge, explain product features, and help workers get more done with MaintainX!
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