preventative maintenance procedures 3

[Buck27]

I am a young engineer who has been asked to begin a preventative maintenance program from scratch. Any ideas where to start? Any tips available? Is there any computer programs or spreadsheets freely available that might be of help?

 

[shippo]

Hi respondentents.
I am out of the condition monitoring industry for 10 yrs. now.
We used to do PM so equipment would not fail at a bad time. We had VM, OA, & various other methods to PREDICT when failure might be imminent. It worked until the beancounters started working out that reduced maintenance spending meant less maintenance workforce.

To get effective Predictive Maint. in place u must start at the end product/result and work backwards. If your customer cannot have his product because of a failed say, gearbox/bad mixture, just before delivery, he's gonna be pissed.
So to answer the original question....Work backwards from the end product. The more value added to the product the more expensive to the supplier if it does'nt meet QA.

 

[automatic2]

Hi Shippo, I like what your saying in regards to 'begin with the end in mind'. Unfortunatley, negotiating with cost conscious managers or niave beancounters is a go forward type of activity and you take what you can get on a day to day basis as far as building value. A costly brake down usually sets the stage for renewed negotiations. I had the experience of spending several years fighting a loosing battle as an economic downturn prompted layoffs, product devaluing, lower raw product quality, growing breakdowns, reduced part purchases, etc. I left over a spat with management who critized my warnings. These days I carry the 'Begin with the end in mind' message to businesses around the country. Much better pay I might add.

 

[capnjohn]

An offering from someone who has been in various maintenance departments. One of the more prevalent frustrations of a Maintenance Tech is the companies inability to see that cheaper is not better (not in all cases). They'll buy a box of light bulbs for $0.30/ea. And end up replacing 5 per year, if they would have purchased the $1.00/ea they would end up maybe replacing it once per year or less. The same applies across the board- cheap usually increases maintenance costs. More later.

 

[Binary]

Ditto to capnjohn - be sure to track your maintenance costs including the labour for various tasks so you know whether your $0.30 light bulbs are costing you $100/yr in extra labour costs.

When we began our PM program from scratch, we formed a team of engineers, techs, and ops people to sit down and brainstorm everything on the property that could conceivable require some sort of maintenance.

We then assigned scores for ramifications of failure (production criticality, the number of dependent systems, safety, environmental), a subjective assessment of the likelihood of failure (how robust the system was), a subjective assessment of the likely downtime (did we have spares, good documentation, drawings, etc).

After that, we came up with an aggregate ranking scheme that gave each system an overall priority score so that we knew where to start. Otherwise, you don't know whether you're investing your labour in the right places in the early parts of your program.

Document your decision matrix so that everybody can understand it and then you can modify it as needed.

Good communications and planning is critical to a successful maintenance program

 

[pablo02]

Above all, remember these are TOOLS not RULES -- people are the brains behind these issues, unless this fact is utilized in the program, you will have problems;

I turned down working at a nuclear plant because the paper work was THE important thing; it is extremely frustrating to have a foreman refuse to place an oil absorbant boom at a pump intake because you have not had time to generate a work ticket (not at a nuclear site) -- or have your boss force you to spend thousands of dollars implimenting a CMMS when you barely have the staff to operate, let alone support such a system (when your application is adequately provided for by the back of an envelope)...