When is the last time you reviewed your preventive maintenance (PM) forms for collection of useless data? Techs may be wasting huge amounts of time collecting data that nobody is going to act upon. The thinking behind this situation is typically, “We’ll have it if we ever need it.”
Resources are limited, however, so you get situations like scaling back maintenance, which means some equipment gets little or no preventive maintenance. Or, people take shortcuts instead of doing a good job. And if nobody is acting upon any the flood of data being collected, what is the point of data collection?
A better way to use the data collection process is to focus on the data needed to prevent failures and not worry about the “just-in-case” stuff. Assess the most likely failure modes, and collect the data that will be useful in preventing those modes of failure.
If someone is using the collected data to generate meaningful queries and reports, then patterns will become visible. Seeing these patterns is the basis for engineering failure out of equipment. Eliminate a failure mode, and you have that much less data collection to do.
