Jishu Hozen: Autonomous Maintenance in the Manufacturing Industry
Jishu Hozen is a Japanese word, when translated to English it means autonomous maintenance. “Jishu” loosely stands for independence or autonomy, while “Hozen” means preservation, integrity or conservation. Jishu Hozen is one of the eight pillars of Total Productive Maintenance, the other pillars are as follows:
- Focused Improvement
- Planned Maintenance
- Training & Education
- Early Management
- Quality Maintenance
- Safety, Health & Environment
- TPM in the Office
Jishu Hozen refers to activities that help to thoroughly eliminate failures, unnecessary stoppages, defects, and other losses so as to restore manufacturing equipment to their desirable forms. This entails maintaining them and developing manpower that are skillful at operating and improving the equipment. It is an ideology that simply means the operators work itself carried out in a stepwise manner through small group activities closely unified with the managerial structure.
Autonomous maintenance is designed to pursue high efficiency of production system by changing the workers’ ways of thinking and attitude, thereby greatly improving the overall equipment efficiency with the operator personally protecting his own equipment by himself. The operator ensures that work is started with improvement of basic conditions of the equipment being used (cleaning, oiling, and retightening).
Objectives of Jishu Hozen (Autonomous Maintenance)
The primary goal of Jishu Hozen is to empower the operator to make a conscious effort to ensure the performance of his equipment and processes through daily maintenance however basic they seem as against the normal practice of categorizing employees as operator and technical staff with each category having defined job description.
Jishu Hozen’s goal is to reduce the situation whereby employees only stick to their roles as defined their job description (leaving technical duties to technical staff and vice versa) by empowering the employees to take responsibility of some basic aspects of machine maintenance including cleaning, lubrication and inspection, leaving more thorough maintenance to the technical staff.
Autonomous maintenance addresses natural deterioration by trying as much as much as possible to extend the life of the machine beyond its nameplate lifespan through establishment of the basic condition of the machine through activities such as cleaning, lubricating, tightening and oiling.
Specifically, some other objectives of autonomous maintenance program include the following:
- Checking the deterioration of machines and taking steps to prevent such.
- Keeping machines/ equipment working at their optimal performance to prevent deterioration.
- Returning equipment to their original condition.
- Preventing machines from failing.
- Increasing the skill levels of the operators through training.
- Preventing quality defects.
- Improving profitability.
The 7-Step Approach for Jishu Hozen Implementation
- Step 1: lnitial cleaning & inspection
This first step involves thoroughly eliminating dust, dirt and others from inner part of the cover through cleaning, and cleaning every corner of the equipment, detecting and correcting equipment nonconformity/latent defects for restoration, oiling and retightening, as a result, preventing forced deterioration.
- Step 2: Remedy for contamination sources and hard-to-access areas
This is the second step of Jishu Hozen. This step involves detecting sources of dust and stains, preventing scattering of dust, and improving hard-to-access areas for cleaning, oiling, retightening, or inspection, and shortening time for these activities.
- Step 3: Drafting standards for Jishu-Hozen
This step involves preparing action standards to be observed by oneself, so that cleaning, oiling, retightening, and inspection can easily be performed in a short period of time as reasonable possible.
- Step 4: General inspection
This step involves understanding the structure, functions, and principles of the equipment, and how they should be in order to be able to improve the equipment efficiency; you need to inspect the main mechanism and parts that constitute the equipment without exception; detect latent defects; and restore or improve the equipment to desired conditions. It involves acquiring the skills that are needed to check the parts of the equipment functional components.
- Step 5: Autonomous inspection
This step involves reviewing the drafted autonomous and general inspection standards, and preparing standards that ensures efficient inspection and prevention of inspection errors, and maintaining the equipment in its desirable conditions.
- Step 6: Standardization of inspection
While striving for zero losses, review and standardize items to be controlled at work sites including raw materials/products, dies/jigs/tools, written work standards and records, measuring instruments, cleaning/inspection outfit, and transport equipment, in addition to facilities. This step focuses on daily maintenance with established check-sheets to maintain the equipment.
- Step 7: Thorough implementation, results and continual improvement
This step aims to consolidate all the activities undertaken in step 1 to 6. In this step, the operator develops confidence by witnessing the positive changes made in the equipment and surrounding workplaces. This step encourages continuous improvement which should be seen as an endless process in which they can and must take the initiative. The step helps the operator to take control of the equipment without relying on external support and relentlessly drive towards achieving zero failures & defects.
About the Author
Adebayo is a thought leader in continuous process improvement and manufacturing excellence. He is a Certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt (CSSMBB), Digital Manufacturing Professional and ISO Management Systems Lead Auditor (ISO 9001, 45001 & ISO 22000) with strong experience leading various continuous improvement initiative in top manufacturing organizations.
You can reach him here.
