White Papers

Maintenance Engineering

Despite the benefits of an effective maintenance engineering function, many companies fail to make it a top priority – and suffer the results; unreliable plant and equipment, reduced throughput, poor recoveries, excessive costs, and lost business.

In capital intensive industries, maintenance costs can represent upwards of 30%-50% of total operating costs. And in many executives’ minds, maintenance engineering becomes a reluctant part of this cost of doing business. Why do they have this perception? The reality is that, for a variety of reasons, maintenance and operations managers have not demonstrated the real value that maintenance engineering can add - increased throughput, lower working capital requirements, increased labour productivity, improved safety, and lower costs – all measurable on the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statements.

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Capacity Assurance

There’s no doubt about it; these are challenging times. For those in the machinery industry, the litany of challenges seems endless: globalization, a shaky export advantage, industry consolidation, the cost of U.S. produced capital, etc. But there’s a light, and it’s not at the end of the tunnel, it’s within the tunnel—and it’s accessible to all manufacturers, even those with tight capital budgets. I call it “Capacity Assurance.”

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Rapid Operations Assessment

It’s easy to say that shareholder value is important. It’s not so easy to make it influence the decisions that are made every day: where to spend time and resources, how best to get things done, and ultimately, how to win in the marketplace.

The complexity of business has increased dramatically over the past decade. More products. Higher service expectations. Faster cycle times. Tighter financial management. And Globalization. We all appreciate that improving the performance of a company’s operations can significantly boost revenue, profitability and cash flow. We also know that it can improve customer loyalty by ensuring that customers get the products they need when they need them at a cost that’s reasonable. But the links between increasing shareholder value and driving those increases through “Operations Excellence” are not always obvious. For the investor, financial institution, or company itself, the question often becomes “”where do we start?” KCB answers this and several complementary questions in this article titled Rapid Operations Assessment

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Strategic Sourcing: High Gain, Low Pain

Optimizing the supply chain requires careful attention to overall strategy, supporting technology, and judicious sourcing. We’ve heard a lot about the first two, but sourcing is an equally important leg of the supply chain stool – and a way for suppliers to drive out cost, as well as, increase and sustain their relationships with their customers.

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Taking Lean Manufacturing Beyond the Shop Floor

Manufacturers tend to spend a great deal of time looking at the concepts of lean manufacturing and Six Sigma and how they can apply on the shop floor. But on the whole, they’ve given far less thought to how they can benefit by applying lean principles in corporate “white spaces” — their business process environments, which include such functions as engineering, product development, order to cash, procure to pay, and sales.

According to Karl Kelton, a consultant who specializes in the manufacturing industry, organizations need to educate themselves on how to apply lean in non-traditional areas. “The traditional thinking out there is, ‘I’m familiar with lean. It’s the Toyota Production System, and it applies to the shop floor and discrete manufacturing processes,’” says Kelton. Taking lean principles into organizations’ business process environments can help in myriad ways, Kelton stresses, but only if those organizations stop looking at lean as simply cost or waste reduction, and start looking at it as a way to create value.

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Safety Performance: How much is it costing you?

It’s clear that progressive organizations value safety. They spend significant amounts of time and money attempting to ensure their health and safety objectives are understood and complied to.

What’s not as clear to senior management is whether these investments are delivering their expected returns.

Download complete paper (PDF, 38KB)

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