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Maintenance: It’s Risky Business

Jan. 3, 2017
Structure your maintenance around the idea of risk.

The allocation of scarce maintenance resources can be hard to get right. Those resources are usually less than what is actually needed.

Is it unfortunate that a feeder breaker fails and an entire production area is down for three days? Or did somebody choose that outcome? Answer: It was a choice that began with which resources to allocate where.

What if the choice had been to perform all the recommended maintenance on that breaker, using resources that would otherwise have gone to your fine sump pump maintenance program? Not that sump pumps aren’t important, but they (usually) present a very different cost dynamic than a major feeder breaker does.

Risk analysis can help you correctly allocate maintenance resources. But what risk are you analyzing? Actually, several risks are involved. First, you can’t risk safety or the environment so you must allocate all of the necessary resources to cover your bases there.

The next type of risk is financial risk. How much would loss of that equipment cost in terms of production downtime and equipment replacement? This is where we differentiate between those sump pumps and that feeder breaker.

You can also assess: equipment for its probability of failure, adjusting resources against changes in risk. The more you structure your maintenance around the idea of risk, the more efficiently you will use those scarce maintenance resources.

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