One of the most disheartening experiences in business is being told that you have done very well but next year your budgets are being cut back further and you must do even better. No matter how handsome the profits you have achieved, or how princely the margins, our masters – whether shareholders or company managers – can never be completely satisfied. We must continually improve.
The subject of continuous improvement is at the heart of our focus on the USA in this issue. Tom Sothard, president of Crane Pro Services, is a strong proponent of the concept known as reliability based maintenance management (RBMM). Sothard believes that most of the industry has moved from standard maintenance to predictive maintenance, knowing when parts are due for replacement, but he reckons that few have made the leap to the more holistic RBMM, reducing the maintenance effort by making parts last longer. This quest for continuous improvement has helped Crane Pro Services become, and remain, the USA’s biggest crane service contractor.
Morris Material Handling, too, has embraced continuous improvement in an even more esoteric guise: Kaizen. Definitions of Kaizen seem to range from an approach to quality management, at its most simple level, to a life-changing solution to the search for spiritual enlightenment. It is probably nearer to the former than the latter, and is based on the idea that we should constantly seek to make small steps to improve what we do and the way we do it. While Kaizen is appropriate for personal development it is also an appropriate approach for companies seeking to stay ahead of the competition.
Reliability based maintenance management and Kaizen are just two of many possible approaches to keeping ahead of the game. We would be interested to hear about yours. Tell us.
