Maintenance Technology April 2017 - 17

PLANT PROFILE

this condition-based maintenance
group," she said. "We are sharing good
ideas and processes across facilities. We
now have a maintenance and reliability
community."
Eli Lilly employs Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and the use of
many chemicals requires a high level
of cleanliness that is checked daily and
regulated by government bodies.
Changeovers can often take weeks.
"We check everything," Wenzel said.
"There is very involved and stringent
criteria for how we clean a building.
Regulations are a challenge, but they
keep you on your toes. You don't even
notice it anymore because it becomes a
part of what you do. It doesn't faze the
day-to-day thinking."

Operational excellence
Eli Lilly works with cross-functional
teams in which maintenance, engineering, and operations are working on
the overall process. Operations manager
Jason Miller is responsible for running
the process. Maintenance corrects
the issues and performs preventive
maintenance to get ahead of equipment failures and prevent unplanned
downtime.

"Anytime we have an equipment
failure we evaluate what happened and
see what process we can put in place
to get ahead of those things," Miller
said. "Line mechanics are on each shift
and work with our line operators to
understand and troubleshoot issues. We
get ahead of issues to ensure [there is]
no impact to the quality of our process.
With advanced robotics and a large
amount of automation, monitoring
performance and quality is key to
successful operation and production,
Miller stated. "Everything is captured,
including downtime and rejects," he
explained. "We identify corrective
actions at every morning meeting.
We use the data on the line to drive
improvement. The line is automated,
but if there is a reject every 100 cycles,
we need to take action. The robotics
never stop. If you see overloads or
rejects over time, this tells you about
mechanical wear and other issues with
the equipment. We drive data-driven
decisions for maintenance."
The preventive maintenance includes
lubricating linear slides each month.
When vibration is detected, adjustments
are made immediately. "The machines
tell us what's going on. We just have to

know how to read them," Miller said.
"We have manual and visual quality
checks, but the machines also do quality
checks. Reliability is critical because
when patients are waiting on their
medicine, the machines have to run the
way they are supposed to run all the
time. We have standards, and they have
to be precise. This is medicine going
into someone's body. We are the last
step of the process. It has to be packaged
and labeled correctly, as well."
Mike Campbell is the maintenance
planner and scheduler for PDAP and
has developed a system in which all
preventive maintenance is performed
during scheduled shutdowns.
"We develop a schedule with every
piece of equipment and every scheduled
PM associated with it," Campbell said.
"One line may have 50 to 60 PM work
orders to perform during the week of
the scheduled line shutdown. We bring
in a lot of resources to do it all at once,
typically requiring a day shift and a
night shift."

Changing lives
with reliability
Wenzel said that looking at how each
department interacts helps to put all the
pieces of the reliability puzzle together.
They have even received outside recognition of their practices in Indianapolis.
In 2008, The Corporate Lubrication
Technical Committee, of which Wenzel
is the chair, won the ICML John Battle
Award for machinery lubrication.
"It's not only a cost piece, there is a
whole asset-management piece and a
whole people piece that we have to look
at-not just the numbers, the metrics,
the bars and charts-it's the whole thing
that makes a facility tick," she explained.
"Reliability isn't just my job...it is
everyone's job. Every time I get into my
car and turn the key, I expect it to come
on. Every time I run that piece of equipment, I want it to perform the same way

Eli Lilly and Company uses robots on an
assembly line to carefully package its
products.

APRIL 2017

MAINTENANCETECHNOLOGY.COM | 17
http://www.MAINTENANCETECHNOLOGY.COM
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Maintenance Technology April 2017
