Reduction of Life-cycle Costs of Locomotives by Leaning Maintenance Process

Abstract

Increasing the role of rail in balancing the transport of goods is a big challenge all over the world nowadays. Statistics clearly show a large disproportion of the volume transported by various means of inland transport where the railway business is still in the minority. One of the reasons is the cost of transported goods. It is important to know how costs affecting the final price of transported goods by rail are divided in order to reduce them. This paper presents the possibility of using life cycle costs of the product in order to take productivity to the next level and save considerable amounts of time, money, and resources. The aim of this article is to define what are Life Cycle Costs and if lean tools may be applied in transport companies. The research has been conducted over the number of years in one of the largest rail freight operator in Poland. The main goal of the investigation was to analyze costs of the diesel locomotive maintenance process in a whole lifecycle and investigate the impact of using lean tools on those costs. In this project lean tools such as: Standard Work Combination Sheet, Spaghetti diagram, Visual Management, Cause and Effect Diagram, PDCA, 5S, standardization cards were used. For better analysis Voice of the Customer and Critical to Quality tools were added. The results of this analysis are presented in this paper and prove the big impact on reducing time, improving product quality as well as integrating people, data, processes and business systems. The use of lean is deliberate because it can lead to 50% cost reduction of the P1 maintenance level on diesel locomotives with a significant reduction of working hours up to 60%. The outcome of this analysis should help the company to achieve a significant reduction in the cost of maintaining locomotives, which will contribute to a lower cost of transporting goods by rail. Keywords: lean management, life cycle costs, locomotive maintenance process