Bad maintenance practices tend to sneak into the way things get done. Here are three more to guard against:
Bad Practice #23 — Trying to Set a Record for Longest Time between Outages.
While this might please non-technical managers in the short term, it sets the stage for unplanned outages that are invariably extended and costly. It also greatly increases the risk of failures from which the facility cannot recover.
Bad Practice #24 — Planning an Outage without an Exhaustive Review of the Records from the Last Outage.
You need to assess the needs for training, test equipment, contractor resources, lighting, temporary power, spare parts, etc. If the records of the last outage don't clearly show how well these were handled, you have one more issue to correct in this outage.
Bad Practice #25 — Planning an Outage without Extensive Pre-Outage Testing.
An outage is probably your best opportunity to fix known problems. You want to identify as many of these as possible during the outage. For example, conduct thorough thermographic scans six months pre-outage and order needed replacement parts.
