Maintenance Operations At Spokane Steel Foundry

In March of 2008 when I took over the maintenance shop at Spokane Industries Steel Foundry Division

, I knew it was going to be an experience that I couldn't begin to imagine. It was a blank slate. With support from a good core management group and great ownership we could do anything we set our mind to. This wasn't the first steel foundry that I have had an opportunity to help improve but I was hoping that we could be so effective that it might just be my last.

The Maintenance Department at Spokane Industries is somewhat immature from an organizational stand point, but we have the fortitude and the tools in place to get from good to great in an orderly manner and timely fashion.

Spokane Industries Maintenance Department personnel are in a time of transition and change. And we all know how difficult that can be, especially with maintenance guys. I know because I am one.

We are starting our passage from reactive to proactive maintenance with a good base. eMaint Enterprises LLC furnishes our Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) support and they do an outstanding job. We have utilized their system to relocate and catalog over 3800 part numbers, tracked all of our critical to success metrics, built a purchasing platform, and we are even starting to benefit from mean time between failure data and work order history.

Using Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), the leadership of the department has started to turn preventative maintenance over to autonomous exercises, allowing specialized maintenance to perform detailed inspections to ward off catastrophic failure scenarios. We have been able to reduce inventory while still feeling confident we will have the parts on hand for scheduled maintenance once the inspection process reveals the useful life of the component to be nearly expired.

We have over two centuries of maintenance experience amoungst electricians and millwrights and I feel extremely lucky to have inherited the talent we have in this shop. Our task is now to get that knowledge documented and available to the younger staff members and to get the veterans utilizing lean maintenance techniques to determine Root Cause (RCA) during the repair process of failed machinery. We have already implemented several action items that have eliminated root cause of failures and moved some dollars right to the bottom line. The largest hurdle here is that we have had virtually no early machine management, and some of the equipment has been around a while.

Although we have an uncertain economic future and many challenges to face we are dedicated and unwavering in our quest for excellence and continuous improvement. After all, the mother of invention is necessity, and our necessity is to do more with less through increased efficiencies.

Production Manager for Spokane Steel Foundry Billy Newman states, "The opportunity to achieve success is great with Spokane Industries Maintenance Department and I believe the individuals within the maintenance department are up to the challenge. We have great leadership at the shift level and the momentum is in our favor. In my opinion we are poised at this point to attack the heavy hitters, and really start to benefit our internal customers."

The road is long, but with facilitation from management, and support at the operator level we can make Predictive Maintenance a reality, and help Spokane Industries continue as a world class supplier of steel and iron castings.

by: Justin Olesen

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