Maintenance Management Legends (part 4)

part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7

Torbjorn Idhammar IDCON - Maintenance consultants
Posted 12-13-04

There are many paradigms and legends surrounding maintenance management in plants. Often, the legends are known to be untrue, but people live with them because it is politically correct, or simply convenient. To be successful in improving equipment reliability and maintenance management, plants must break the legends that exist in their organizations. Some of the legends will be addressed in this article. You may find that these legends are uncomfortably close to describing how your plant operates.

Legend 4: Having more maintenance people on shift reduces downtime

If you have many problems in your plant, operations typically requests more people on shift to fix the breakdowns. If this is the situation in your plant, you are going down the wrong path.

If you have a multitude of problems in your plant, you need to find out why and fix the source of the problems. What is the solution for your plant? Most likely you don't have enough time to repair all equipment problems found in your area, and you don't always find the problems before a breakdown. So we need more people, right? In the short run possibly, but not necessarily. Definitely not in the long run. Here is a checklist of possible problems:

• Do operators perform detailed equipment inspections? If not, make sure operators know how to inspect a bearing, motor, coupling, hydraulic motor, fluid coupling, etc.
• Do your maintenance people have detailed inspection lists, take readings, and analyze trends in order to identify symptoms on equipment?
• Do you use your craftspeople by having well-planned jobs for them? Do you schedule maintenance jobs in coordination with operations? By executing high-quality inspections, we can make sure that we know about most symptoms.

to be continued....