It’s the rare maintenance department that isn’t chasing its own tail all day long. There are X number of breakdowns but only 80% of the resources needed to handle those and perform the preventative maintenance work. Since the breakdowns are what generate the sound and the fury from the production department, the maintenance department typically pulls resources from prevention to repair. In the (very) short-term, this works to alleviate the pressure, but it puts into motion a vicious cycle.
This situation can arise from one or any combination of factors, whether precipitating or exacerbating the problem. You may have seen the following examples in your own facility:
- Someone retires or quits, and no replacement is hired for several months.
- It was hard to find someone for an open maintenance slot, and the person who was finally hired turns out to be committed to avoiding work.
- An ill-advised headcount reduction leaves you one person short.
- One of the more skilled maintenance people is injured due to unsafe acts, leaving you one person short for two weeks.
- An equipment upgrade is not accompanied by the test equipment purchase or the formal training needed to maintain the equipment.
- Equipment is into its end-of-life phase. Rather than being proactively replaced as the age limit hit, it’s being reactively repaired.
- An event (e.g., series of transient voltage spikes) occurs, causing unseen insulation damage that slowly progresses into a large increase of seemingly random failures.
- A production line is now being run on two shifts instead of one because there’s a new demand for what it produces.
- Some non-electrical failure is the root cause of electrical failures, but nobody has even looked for that root cause yet. For example, hundreds of tiny leaks have developed in the plant air system, which is why the compressors cycle on and off so much and consequently overheat. The solution is more than just fixing the leaks, but doing so will help greatly.
- Raw materials sourcing was changed to a low-bid supplier, and the materials are below standard. Maintenance wastes many labor hours chasing a failure ghost only to prove it’s not the equipment that is malfunctioning.
The list of possible causes can go on and on, but the list at your particular facility won’t. There are probably three or fewer causes. The challenge is to identify at least one, and then develop a plan for negating it.
Outsourcing, streamlining procedures
Consider the first item in that list. Rather than wait for the hiring process to fill that slot, you could outsource some function, project, or position. Contact a technical services firm that provides maintenance services. If the person who left was your thermographer, it is going to take a while for HR to fill that slot. However, you can outsource thermography to a technical services firm. If you can do that permanently, HR could find a replacement tech at a lower rate and from a larger pool of candidates.
In many cases, job function redesign and upgrades in tools and test equipment can fill gaps. For example, let’s say every motor PM involves taking branch circuit voltage measurements. If you multiply the time required for taking those measurements by the number of motors, you see a huge cost. Why would the voltage change from motor to motor? There’s no reason. You don’t need to do this measuring except in troubleshooting.
What about critical motors? Install a permanent readout device on each one to shorten the task time by 98%. Or, eliminate that task by putting the motor on a power monitor. Combine that with eliminating vibration testing (cheap wireless monitoring makes this obsolete), and you get even more time savings.
You may find that streamlining PM procedures by eliminating unnecessary tasks or replacing them with automation frees up 45 labor hours per week, which makes that new hire problem moot. This job function redesign solves the majority of possible causes of being in firefighting mode.
Other options
Some other ways to get out of firefighting mode include:
- Ensure you have a tiered system for transient protection in your power distribution system.
- Ensure any large motors start via soft starter or variable-frequency drive instead of across the line.
- Calculate voltage imbalance on most of your motors and correct as needed. Remember, lighting is a single-phase load. When lighting and motor loads are fed from the same panel, it’s easy to get voltage imbalance on motor circuits.
- Look at the maintenance records for service switches, breakers, and cables. Do the same for feeder breakers and cables. Do they even exist? If so, do they conform to the applicable standards such as ANSI/NETA MTS-2019? If management wants to “defer” (not perform) the required testing, ask them to give you the revenue projections they expect to see if the plant burns down because a breaker failed to open or your core line won’t run because a breaker won’t close.
- Actively seek ways to make maintenance more efficient. Some fairly inexpensive purchases pay big dividends. These include industrial-quality battery-powered tools, better permanent lighting at panels, high-lumen battery-powered portable LED luminaires, step drill bits, inductive voltage testers, and current generation tool caddy systems.
- Develop a training matrix. Identify each specific training element that is needed to maintain the equipment. It is not necessary or practical for everyone to be trained in everything. Thus, identify how many slots (number of people who should have this training) to have for each training element. Identify who already has the training and fill slots with what you have. Then, ask people which skills they are interested in and fill in the rest. For best results, send the person who needs the training to get the training. The “train-the-trainer” approach seldom results in a transfer of knowledge to the person who actually needs it.
- Ensure at least two electricians have systematic training in the National Electrical Code. Many resources for this exist, including self-study programs designed for electrical exam preparation. In a typical facility, violations of Art. 110 account for an amazing number of gremlins. That’s just one of about 125 articles in the NEC.
- If you’ve been having mysterious electrical problems that keep electricians tied up with trouble calls, have a qualified engineer conduct a power quality analysis.
