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World-Class Maintenance – Part 2

By Drive, Inc. on Tuesday 16 May 2017.

In last month’s newsletter, we discussed the different types of maintenance strategies seen in businesses. This month, we will start our discussion with what it takes to develop a world-class maintenance strategy. When a company decides to implement a truly effective maintenance strategy, it doesn’t come cheaply. The graph below shows that there is a substantial increase in maintenance cost in the beginning. However, one can expect the cost to drop below the original cost over time.

World-Class Maintenance – Part 1

By Drive, Inc. on Saturday 15 April 2017.

To ensure we have the right understanding when it comes to maintenance, we must change how we view it. In Drive’s opinion, maintenance produces capacity; Maintenance is not a service organization. It is a capacity assurance organization. This understanding of maintenance will resonate better with the executives within the organization. It will also aid the maintenance group in gaining support for the significant investments needed to implement a proper maintenance strategy. With the proper maintenance strategy the maintenance group will be able to alert the operational team of pending problems before the operational team is aware of a problem thus ensuring capacity when the business needs it most.

Maintenance Prevention is not Preventive Maintenance!

By Drive, Inc. on Wednesday 15 March 2017.

I remember buying my first car: a used, light blue, 1972 four-door Toyota Corona sedan, with manual transmission, and all in good working order. Once at home in my small studio apartment, I read the vehicle’s manual cover-to-cover. I discovered rather quickly that the service requirements to keep this big investment running were extensive, and expensive (at least for my budget at the time). I was a trainee accountant living on hope and soon discovered that I would also need to become a maintenance mechanic, as I could not afford to pay the service fees to keep my Toyota running.

Executing the Strategy Part 2

By Drive, Inc. on Wednesday 15 February 2017.

In last month’s newsletter, we discussed the issues with focus traps and being unable to execute strategy. This month we will cover some practical solutions to help your organization avoid focus traps and thus improve execution.

Executing the Strategy Part 1

By Drive, Inc. on Wednesday 18 January 2017.

In our last series, we covered the creation of a strategy that aligns across the entire organization. In this new series, we will discuss how to ensure the organization is executing that strategy. This is a critical step once the strategy has been developed. We have created the plan; now we must do something with it.

Year End Newsletter 2016

By Drive, Inc. on Saturday 31 December 2016.

A colleague had a poster up in his office quoting Peter Drucker, the famous management effectiveness author, speaker, and guru. It simply reads,"Culture eats strategy for breakfast." Then below it, a post script reads "Same goes for objectives." I was intrigued, as I, alongside my colleagues, perform a lot of work with clients around the creation and implementation of strategy and objectives.

Drive in Japan Part 3

By Drive, Inc. on Tuesday 15 November 2016.

We all know, or at least we think we know, how to make things better. Yet we fail to make things better. We say we know what we are doing, but the evidence proves that we spend most of our time correcting things that have gone wrong, without really fixing the process that could prevent the problem in the first place. We call this firefighting, and we are experts at it. We hear about someone else who seems to make things work so easily and wonder how they do it. So we visit them where they produce their goods, but they fail to show us how they work to make their products in a timely manner, without defects. They fail to show us how they organize and facilitate everyone’s work so that nothing goes wrong. So we come away still bewildered about what we have seen, while failing to understand how and why what we have seen actually works so well.

Maintenance Prevention

By Drive, Inc. on Saturday 15 October 2016.

Typically, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is depicted as a house with pillars. The number of pillars and the classification on each pillar can differ widely. At Drive, we see TPM as shown in figure one below.

Strategic Alignment Part 5

By Drive, Inc. on Thursday 15 September 2016.

Over the past few months, we have discussed aspects of our team’s trip to Japan. We hope you have enjoyed our digression, and now it is time to complete our series on Developing Strategy for the Organization. If you would like a full recap of the first four parts of this series, please click here. A brief recap follows:

Drive in Japan Part 2

By Drive, Inc. on Tuesday 16 August 2016.

In last month’s newsletter, I informed you that we had the pleasure of visiting three manufacturers in Japan, including Toyota and AVEX, a tier two supplier of valves to Toyota. I described what we learned while visiting Toyota. This month I would like to share what we experienced and learned at Avex.

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