Antony Rowe CPI achieves 10% OEE improvement with the Total Productive Maintenance strategy

Hello everyone and welcome to my first blog as the acting Managing Director at Continua. Brian Cuddy has done a fantastic job guiding Continua over the past few years and has left to take up a position at our parent company, Xerox. I first joined Continua in July 2007 as National Sales Manager after working for Xerox for over 20 years in numerous roles and positions. I am very much looking forward to the coming months and the great opportunity the role provides.

When I was asked to pick a subject for my opening blog it was easy following the success the team has had deploying the Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) strategy at Antony Rowe CPI.

The scheme has been a huge success helping develop closer relationships between equipment maintenance and Antony Rowe CPI’s operations team. The TPM strategy has been highly effective in improving equipment maintenance at the site. With our customer operations teams working all stages of the production line staff are able to action issues quicker with instant productivity improvement. The need for call-outs has also been avoided, as the scheme requires a focused approach to continuous improvement and improved predictive maintenance with the introduction of the ‘Mean Time To Repair’, which helps staff to map where key parts and technical documentation are kept on-site.

By tackling the root causes of common issues and having a more collaborative approach to resolving them we have been able to work with CPI to further enhance the efficient and excellent service we offer our customers.

So how do you measure the benefit I hear you ask? The TPM allows us to measure OEE by the ratio of availability, performance rate and quality rate which in time will enable businesses to access whether their production line is efficient overall.

The results are clear. Antony Rowe CPI has achieved over 10% OEE improvement on its key production line in just 10 weeks of the strategy being implemented. 80% of all problems were actioned on site due to the ‘Mean Time To Repair’ process reducing call-out charges and machine downtime. Additional successes secured can be seen in the improved supplier relationship, the reduction in fix times and total machine down times and the true partnership approach that can now be taken.

Furthermore I am happy to report that Antony Rowe CPI are looking to the future and continuing to work with us to extend the TPM programme to other parts of the business, maintain the continuous improvement of OEE at a management level and further develop the use of TMP lean tools. All of which we are extremely keen to help build upon and continue the success that Antony Rowe CPI has seen so far.