Continuous Maintenance Improvement (CMI)

WHY CMI?

Over the last number of years the squeeze has been put on manufacturing and every production process is being macro-studied and micro-examined to see where it can be modernised, maximised, customised, optimised and capitalised to ensure highest possible yield at lowest possible cost.

In the current climate of “lean manufacturing” and “JIT Production” companies are going after the low hanging fruit to maximise their revenue, lower their costs and consolidate their market share. Their purpose – to deliver greater yield per unit cost or ton produced or per man hour expended. Whichever way they measure their bottom line, to survive this current global recession they need to:

• Keep reducing costs per unit produced
• Or increase unit output for the same cost to maintain their margins and competitiveness

ESS Ltd. provides their Award Winning Continuous Maintenance Improvement Service (CMI) to a cross section of clients in the Food and Beverage, Manufacturing Industry and Public Sector Companies in Ireland & the UK to help our clients challenge and not accept their equipment availability and reliability norms. Effective Asset Management ensures that equipment is always available and reliable for production requirements to meet the demands of the market place.

The goal of the ESS Ltd. CMI Service is to put the structures in place to ensure the maintenance department’s best possible contribution to manufacturing.

Briefly the ESS Ltd. CMI service works with the client’s maintenance & production teams from senior management (i.e. production and engineering/maintenance manager) to craft and operator level to put in place a structured maintenance programme that encompasses the fundamental elements of Maintenance Best Practice. The output of the CMI Service is to optimise plant availability and asset reliability, whilst keeping maintenance costs to an absolute minimum in line with business best practice.

Creative Outsourcing of your Asset Management through CMI

• Tracking the reliability and performance of equipment
• Measuring effectiveness of preventive maintenance schedules and other maintenance activities
• Analysing breakdowns and maintenance related equipment downtime recorded
• Engaging members from the maintenance and operations teams working together in CI Workshops to address failures and increase operator’s knowledge of basic maintenance for their machines
• Carrying out reliability improvement studies on equipment from breakdown data
• Converting the data from reliability and technical studies into straightforward improvement ideas
• Using reliability study information in a creative way involving both maintenance and production to deliver innovative asset management
• Analysing maintenance spend and drilling down to cost expended on assets to highlight areas of waste, high cost or requiring capital investment for improvement
• Bringing forward future improvement initiatives by applying RCM, RCA, FMEA, CBM, Vulnerability Studies, Condition Monitoring Concepts, etc.
• Accurate maintenance data recording to show compliance and control to resellers and retailers of the end products, or for annual audits for compliance to corporate auditing bodies as; EFIS, BRC, HACCP, ISO 9000, IMB, FDA, HSA

To summarise, the ESS Ltd. CMI (Continuous Maintenance Improvement) Service is a management process designed to embed a continuous improvement ethos into your maintenance organisation. It can work with paper-based job cards or any of the computer maintenance management systems currently on the market. The methodology helps to eliminate both sporadic and chronic failures. It is especially useful in highly-regulated environments or where lean manufacturing techniques are used. The process starts with structured planning taking into account practical resource constraints and then evaluates completed jobs to learn the lessons for on-going improvement activities.