The Continuous Improvement module brings Lean, Kaizen and Six Sigma into FreeMaint. Instead of spreadsheets and whiteboards, your team runs daily management, problem-solving and improvement initiatives right next to the assets and work orders they relate to. It is available on the Enterprise plan and can be enabled per company under Company Settings → Modules.

Central action register

Every action raised from a board, an improvement, a problem-solving record or a Gemba walk lands in one register, with an owner, a due date and a status — so nothing falls through the cracks. An action can be escalated into a Work Order when field work is needed.

SQCDP KPI boards

Build digital daily-management boards organized by the SQCDP pillars — Safety, Quality, Cost, Delivery and People. Add a KPI, set its target and direction (higher- or lower-is-better), then record values per day, week or month. Each KPI turns green or red automatically against its target so the whole team sees performance at a glance.

• Group KPIs by Safety / Quality / Cost / Delivery / People
• Live green / red status computed against the target
• Record values by day, week or month
• One board per line, cell or department

Gemba walks

Go to the floor, observe and turn findings into actions. Recurring walk routines are scheduled as Procedures, observations are annotated on floor plans, and 5S or layered process audits run through the Inspections module.

Improvements & Kaizen suggestions

Capture improvement ideas from anyone on the floor. Each suggestion can be voted on, assigned and tracked through its lifecycle from New to Implemented, with an estimated and a realized saving so you can quantify the impact.

• Submit a suggestion or launch a Kaizen event
• One vote per user to surface the best ideas
• Lifecycle: New, Under review, Approved, In progress, Implemented
• Record estimated and realized savings

Visual management boards (Obeya)

Run daily huddles on a digital Obeya room — a free-form board of draggable sticky and smart cards organized in zones, updated live by the whole team.

• Lean templates: SQCDP huddle, Kanban, 5S, Hoshin X-matrix, 4L retrospective, blank canvas
• Smart cards link to a work order, asset, improvement or action and show its live status
• Real-time multi-user collaboration with presence and soft card-locks
• Huddle mode: 15-minute timer, walk the columns, escalate a card to the action register

Structured problem-solving

Run root-cause analysis with the method that fits the problem — A3, 5 Whys, Ishikawa (fishbone), PDCA or DMAIC. Each record keeps the structured analysis and links to the asset, work order or improvement it came from.

• A3 one-page problem solving
• 5 Whys root-cause drill-down
• Ishikawa / fishbone cause categories
• PDCA and DMAIC frameworks

Value Stream Mapping

Map a process step by step and FreeMaint computes the lead time, value-added time and process cycle efficiency for you — so you can see exactly where non-value-added time hides.

• Add process and inventory steps
• Automatic lead time and value-added ratio
• Compare current and future state

OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) is the share of planned production time that produced good parts at ideal speed: Availability × Performance × Quality. FreeMaint records it per asset, for a shift or any other period, next to the downtime and work orders of the same machine.

Business plan

Creating and editing OEE records is part of the Business plan. On every plan, records already logged stay readable and can be deleted.

Who can do what

OEE uses the Continuous Improvement permissions (improvement:read, improvement:create, improvement:update, improvement:delete) plus its own, oee:record, and needs access to the asset. oee:record logs a shift and edits or deletes only the records you logged yourself; the Continuous Improvement permissions act on every record. By default administrators and managers can do everything, supervisors log and edit shifts, technicians log their own shifts and can correct or delete them, viewers read. An administrator can change this in Roles.

Plan and permissions

Business plan

Creating and editing OEE records is part of the Business plan. On every plan, records already logged stay readable and can be deleted.

Who can do what

OEE uses the Continuous Improvement permissions (improvement:read, improvement:create, improvement:update, improvement:delete) plus its own, oee:record, and needs access to the asset. oee:record logs a shift and edits or deletes only the records you logged yourself; the Continuous Improvement permissions act on every record. By default administrators and managers can do everything, supervisors log and edit shifts, technicians log their own shifts and can correct or delete them, viewers read. An administrator can change this in Roles.

Availability

Run time ÷ planned production time, where run time is the planned time minus unplanned downtime.

Performance

Ideal cycle × total units ÷ run time: the speed lost while the asset was running, short stops included.

Quality

Good units ÷ total units.

OEE

Availability × Performance × Quality. Over several records, the times and counts are added up first, so a short shift weighs less than a long one.

How the figures are calculated

Availability

Run time ÷ planned production time, where run time is the planned time minus unplanned downtime.

Performance

Ideal cycle × total units ÷ run time: the speed lost while the asset was running, short stops included.

Quality

Good units ÷ total units.

OEE

Availability × Performance × Quality. Over several records, the times and counts are added up first, so a short shift weighs less than a long one.

The Six Big Losses

Breakdowns and Setup & adjustment cost Availability; Idling & minor stops and Reduced speed cost Performance; Defects & rework and Startup & yield cost Quality. The Pareto ranks them by minutes lost, so the first bar is the first loss to attack.

Logging a shift

1. Click New OEE record, then pick the asset, the period start and end, and optionally a shift label.
2. Click Prefill from data: FreeMaint fills Unplanned downtime (min) with the downtime already logged on the asset over that period, and suggests a planned production time if that field is empty. Correct either value if needed.
3. Check Planned production time (min): the time the asset was scheduled to run, minus planned breaks and periods with no production.
4. Enter Ideal cycle (s/unit), Total units and Good units — good means right first time.
5. Optionally split the lost minutes across the Six Big Losses. Left blank, FreeMaint counts stops as breakdowns, lost speed as reduced speed and bad parts as defects & rework.
6. Save. Availability, Performance, Quality and OEE are calculated for you; they are never typed in.

Where to find it

Open OEE / TPM in the Assets & Locations menu. The page shows three gauges (Availability, Performance, Quality) with the overall OEE, the OEE trend, a Six Big Losses Pareto and the list of records. By default it covers all assets over the last 30 days; pick an asset or change the dates to narrow it.