A significant amount of downtime is caused by maintenance errors. If you can eliminate those errors, you will significantly reduce downtime.
An appliance plant had high rates of motor failure, though no electrical causes could be found. The plant engineer, who was an industrial engineer by education, decided to walk through the relevant motor maintenance procedures. The lubrication procedure said to "Add four squirts of grease."
He began asking questions. How much is a squirt? Is there a calibrated grease gun? What kind of grease? How do we know one guy doesn't add an incompatible grease and create grit that destroys the bearings? How do you get the old grease out?
What came of this questioning was the revelation that more motors were destroyed by two employees who were maintaining them than from all other causes combined. They simply did not know what they were doing, nor did they bother to find out. Where you find equipment failures, review the relevant maintenance procedures and question everything.
Some key problem areas:
- Technical illiteracy (e.g., what kind of grease for the application).
- Undefined metrics (e.g., how much grease).
- Unknown process (e.g., how to get the old grease out).
Also, poor training ensures any corrections to these deficiencies don’t make their way into the field.
