One common cause of avoidable downtime is non-compliance with preventive and predictive maintenance procedures. This problem stubbornly persists despite management’s best efforts to crack down on those “uncooperative technicians” and their supervisors.
But non-compliance usually happens because the procedure writers do their work as an ivory tower exercise. The purpose of maintenance procedures isn’t to tell people how to do the work, but to help them perform all the required steps for completing the work.
In the first mindset, procedures get bloated with long sentences and mind-numbing detail. In the second mindset, procedures begin to resemble a series of verb-noun statements. Warnings, instructions, and helpful tips should be there, but as “boiled down” as practical.
You’ll get significant non-compliance if you provide four paragraphs describing three different ways to measure harmonics on the VFD input. But a step that says, “Record magnitude of fifth harmonic at VFD input terminals L1 and L2” is much easier to wrap your head around.
Here’s a best practice to follow: In the field with technicians performing the work, iteratively work each step out for clarity and simplicity.
