Lean manufacturing practices promise a great deal of benefits and particularly fantastic cost savings. By moving to a lean environment you'll have a "pull system" that minimizes work-in-process inventory increasing working capital. Integrate it with your supply chain practices: purchasing, inventory management, incoming and outgoing logistics and you gain even greater financial benefits. There are a number of companies that can help you implement lean practices and you'll certainly benefit from their help. However, there's an "Achilles' Heel" that often gets overlooked - asset reliability.
In the Physical Asset Management (maintenance) world there are many who equate "lean" with "Total Productive Maintenance". But they are not the same thing - TPM is a way of managing maintenance activities that is used in the Toyota Production System but on its own TPM is not "lean". Outside of the maintenance world there are many who ignore maintenance when implementing "lean". For starters, maintenance is not well understood outside the maintenance world. It's also an area where change invariably bumps into resistance over turf (production vs. maintenance) and sometimes into restrictive labor agreements. It's often considered just too hard to change so it gets ignored. By ignoring maintenance you invariably accept whatever asset reliability you already have and make no further serious attempt to improve it. Both production and maintenance groups are missing a big opportunity to make lean really work well. The consultants that focus on lean are often production-minded so they don't focus attention (yours or theirs) on maintenance.
The world of lean depends on reliable production. If you remove all or most of the work-in-process from your production lines and get rid of incoming and finished good inventory you become highly dependent on reliable asset operation. You attempt to run at your "takt" time pacing but there's a glitch. A series of production work cells is like a chain and it is only as strong as its weakest link. That weakest link if often thought of as a bottleneck. So long as the bottleneck can produce at a rate greater than the "takt" time requires you are OK, but when it goes down the entire lines goes down. After it is repaired you are forced to scramble to make up for lost production, often running at greater than your "takt" rate. This up and down performance is hard on equipment and the instability results in greater variability. Lean is supposed to eliminate all that, but it can't do it if you ignore asset reliability.
TPM works well in a lean environment - I'd argue that you can't really run lean unless you capture the benefits that TPM has to offer but that's another blog entry for another day. Proponents of TPM have occassionally considered RCM as an alternative approach. RCM proponents have often done the same. The father of industrial RCM, John Moubray, who I knew well, argued quite convincingly that RCM was much better than TPM. I disagree - it's not better nor is it worse. They are complementary. TPM is a way of doing things, not a methodology. RCM is a methodology that leads to a re-framed perspective. TPM complements the lean working environment and RCM complements TPM. They are not competitive technologies.
TPM sometimes gets equated with "autonomous maintenance" and "multi-skilling" but that is only one of eight "pillars" of TPM. Both of these have run into significant roadblocks with organized labor. But that doesn't need to stop you from doing those aspects of TPM that are not contentious. 5S does not require significant work on collective agreements. Preventive maintenance and maintenance prevention are natural outcomes of RCM. You can use RCM to put that PM pillar in place. Kaizen doesn't require collective agreement work, nor does doing quality maintenance, training, TPM in the office or health, safety and environmental stewardship. In fact, you already to most of these to some degree or another. If you don't like the name TPM because of the mis-perception I've described above, then call it something else. After all, it's just an "operating system for maintenance". If you want to get into autonomous maintenance and multi-skilling you can always leave that until later when you've got agreement from all parties to proceed. In these days when it is increasinly difficult to find skilled trades to replace retiring baby-boomers autonomous maintenance and multi-skilling provide part of the solution. Another part is to improve asset reliability.
Asset reliability is a key to success in lean. It comes from working on asset failures to eliminate or prevent them and from dealing with the consequences of those failures. Ignoring it will give you trouble with lean.
