Autonomous maintenance culture the operator shall acquire the ability to look at the quality of the product and the performance of the equipment and notice when something is wrong. The ability of the operator will depends on the following skills below:
- Ability to detect equipment abnormalities and make improvement in timely fashion (This depends on setting standards for comparison)
- Ability to understand equipment function and mechanism and the ability to detect causes of abnormalities.
- Ability to understand the relationship between equipment and quality and ability to predict problems in quality and detect their causes.
- Ability to make repairs Development of Autonomous maintenance Means Developing Operators
Strong in Equipment Related Skills :
- Operator can detect deterioration of equipment
- Operator can prevent downtime caused by equipment mis-operation.
- Operator performs machine set up quickly, efficiently and autonomously.
- Operator can do simple cleaning, repairs & diagnostics
- Operator accurately log, record and monitor equipment states and SPC with all this skills & ability the result will be the operator autonomously maintains the equipment he uses.
In equipment side improvement - It will eradicate the six big losses in equipment and driving home the 5S in maintenance. we should note that there are two types of operators:
- A technical oriented person who has some skills regarding machines and some operations
- An operator who is picked from nowhere because the company has procured a new machine.
A technical minded person has the ability to identify any kind of abnormality by use of senses and exposure to different areas of work. He can either target the problem by himself or inform the maintenance team to take charge in time. Is capable of disassembling and assembling a faulty part.
On the other hand a new face to machines has a tendency of only learning very few points about the machine mostly the start/ stop buttons and cleaning. At times they will report the problem when it is too late or on a state of break down. But all depends on how fast one in learning and use of senses. In the autonomous maintenance environment we are shifting the paradigm of everyone.
From old attitude of :
"I'll operate, you fix."...I fix, you design."...I design, you operate.
To the New attitude of
“WE ARE ALL RESPONSIBLE FOR OUR EQUIPMENT."
In the traditional assumptions :
"It is not the operator's responsibility to perform inspection & minor repairs"
All equipment eventually breaks down.
"All breakdowns can be fixed."
In the new attitude of AM environment -
"EQUIPMENT SHOULD NEVER BREAK DOWN."
Each operator in AM environment will be categorize according to their skill and ability like the one