Overview

Benjamin Franklin says: Lost time is never found again.

Lean Business Systems are an important part of Lean Maintenance. You can't have Lean Maintenance with fat, or perhaps worse, nonexistent support structures. The business system is the structure. It is the overhead (non-value-added activity) necessary to carry out maintenance activity. If maintenance activity was the product (if we were maintenance contractors), then any costs outside the work itself would be overhead. The goal is to reduce the non-value-added activity.

In Lean Solutions, Womack and Jones discuss bad processes. "How do we deal with this (bad processes)? Mostly we default to a 'bad people' analysis. The customer concludes that the provider is either an idiot or a crook the dealer decides that the customer is an overbearing incompetent, and the employees conclude that both the owner and the customer are a bad lot." This three-part analysis reflects exactly the attitudes in a plant with a broken maintenance management process. To quote Womack and Jones again "No one wins in a world with broken processes."

One of the European consultancies (Imants BVBA) was discussing some business process fundamentals as they related to Lean operations, in a recent article. Their discussion sheds some light on what to look for in sound business processes:

• A business process is a system of activities that creates value for customers (these are activities that the customer is willing to pay for).

• Processes are cross-departmental. Departments are functional towers of expertise, but processes cut across departments.