Manufacturers globally need help managing equipment and manufacturing maintenance to run efficient operations. Reducing labor costs, troubleshooting failures, and ensuring that spare parts are available when needed cannot be an after-thought.
Moving to Proactive Maintenance Cart Delivery Plan
Even the best industrial carts, with a five-year warranty, can breakdown or a component will breakdown. To get that piece of equipment back to work, maintenance technicians go off to repair it and the required parts are not on hand, delaying the repairs. This delay is a reactive and poor planning strategy when maintenance recurring repairs and the manpower required are predictable. Budgeting the manpower, material resources, and production time can all be a huge cost-savings by having the replacement part in stock.
Topper Industrial established a predictive maintenance and spare parts program allowing manufacturers using cart delivery to proactively convert repair records, modifications, parts used, preventive maintenance tasks, and failures. The preventive maintenance task program prevents spare parts outages and reduce labor costs for repairs.
Cost-Saving Solutions
As Topper Industrial has pioneered the North American Fork Truck Free movement, there were two guiding principles: safety and lean manufacturing. The lean calculation is simple: help customers to save money. Lean organizations follow the dollars and identify where they could have done better, looking at parts costs, inventory holding costs, labor/overtime costs, shipping costs, downtime costs, and costs of quality issues. Having carts out of use is a real cost. OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) measures the actual production and utilization versus the optimal. Cart waiting for replacement casters create a cost. The relative size of cost-saving opportunities can be significant which is why Topper developed a maintenance plan to keep all carts on the plant floor 99 percent of the time.
Optimizing maintenance and spare parts delivers a competitive advantage.
Through impeccable recordkeeping and ongoing data analysis, successful continuous improvement programs drive cost-savings in reduced downtime, improved quality, and reduced labor costs.
Involving maintenance technicians in the improvement process ensures that accurate data is collected. It is essential to continuously improve the maintenance management process. This information will monitor both short-term and long-term trends in required replacement part, ensuring all is in-stock and reduces waste (downtime).
Maintenance implementation plans start before a Topper cart arrives at the customer site. It increases the reliability of assets, improves processes, and ultimately, maximize return- on-investment.
About Topper Industrial
For more than twenty years, Topper Industrial, (www.topperindustrial.com) has been a leading manufacturer of material handling carts and equipment solutions. Topper Industrial designs and builds industrial delivery carts, cart lifts, lifts & tilts, material handling racks, steel containers, casters, tube & joint and industrial cart parts & components. Topper Industrial specializes in services to Manufacturing, Fulfillment, Warehousing and the Distribution Sectors. Topper Industrial’s services include, but are not limited to: Design & customization, manufacturing & production, site analysis & planning and implementation justification. Topper’s material handling solutions make delivering material line side more effective through more efficient practices.
Topper Industrial is a proud member of MHI. Follow on Twitter @TopperInd or on LinkedIn.