[Wirenuting]

PM money is the easiest for a company to save on by not doing it.
Starting a company PM program will always get push back by the workers. If they aren’t busy fixing things it will look like you’re canceling their screw off time. But once they see how much real screw off time they will have once they are caught up, they will enjoy it. Except the hard charging ones who want to fix the world, they will quickly get bored.
PM’s are good as you will find you don’t need to run around putting out the same fires everyday. It all depends on how deep you want to go and how motivated the crew is.
Do you make something important or just a do-hicky?
Can the company afford the historical down time?
Or are they on such a close production scheldule that any downtime is out of the question? Can they afford having replacement stock on hand or afford a redundant system?

 

[paulengr]

Breakdowns and the panic that ensues is never any fun. Especially when you find the parts are "out walking around". Meaning the suppliers do not have them or worse.

Something I thought of when I was "new guy" talk to the men and find some small part or substance that for them is hard to get. Cable clean, ty wraps, decent tape etc.
Makes them feel like your helping them. I have always been a fan of hepa vacuums for cleaning. Picks up the dirt and usually does not spread it around. I hate that. Use to work for an stupid visor, that his concept was to blow everything out, who cares where the dirt goes. Then when the transformer fans turned on they just sucked the dirt out of the air and back to where you just removed it. I am in a hot climate and we run dry type transformer fans all of the time. They really do last longer.

Also watch for MSDS. I have worked places if it is not on their current MSDS list, (20 years old and products are not made any more) you can not buy the product.

Flat out not true. This is the emotional trap that gets push back. PMs are boring.

Ever read a fantasy novel? What is it about? Is it about saving the princess? Nope, that’s the last page or two. The princess never gets mentioned otherwise. It’s all about glorious battles and fights getting there. If there is an epilogue the knight turns out to be a chauvinist and a bore sitting around telling war stories and she divorces him. We glorify fire fighters, soldiers, paramedics. Only Maytag glorifies service people. We are conditioned to WANT to ride in on white horses and save the day. It’s fun. That’s the allure and the problem…PMs are boring. No 100% reactive maintenance program is going to emotionally support a PM program except lip service.

 

[paulengr]

PM money is the easiest for a company to save on by not doing it.
Starting a company PM program will always get push back by the workers. If they aren’t busy fixing things it will look like you’re canceling their screw off time. But once they see how much real screw off time they will have once they are caught up, they will enjoy it. Except the hard charging ones who want to fix the world, they will quickly get bored.
PM’s are good as you will find you don’t need to run around putting out the same fires everyday. It all depends on how deep you want to go and how motivated the crew is.
Do you make something important or just a do-hicky?
Can the company afford the historical down time?
Or are they on such a close production scheldule that any downtime is out of the question? Can they afford having replacement stock on hand or afford a redundant system?

Reactive maintenance costs 300% more. Because of not only lost production (sales) but you’re buying a lot of supplies at premium prices and paying extra for express shipping, emergency rates and overtime. Plus emergency repairs often are patches, not permanent fixes, or a lot of corner cutting goes on.

Study after study has proven this. A lot of companies even with low margin products estimate downtime in thousands of dollars per minute.

PMs initially are a huge eye opener. Once they become routine usually expect a 3% “hit rate” on finding stuff. Think about it…you do a lot of not necessarily cheap work to find one PM out of 30 finds something.

That being said as contractors the most frustrating part is with some customers we find all kinds of issues. We report them and then when we do the PMs again the same stuff is still broken. I’ve been in the unenviable position of sitting on 20 years of PMs pointing to the same issue. Granted it was a $2.5 MM issue and the damage because of it (an ancient worn out analog computer) took 45 days and $15 million to repair. So if you do PMs be prepared to deal with the consequences. It was an easy justification by the way with a 10,000% ROI, just politically embarrassing that the $2.5 MM job kept getting swept under the rug that long.

So look at it from my perspective. We are a motor shop. We make far more money if you just bolt it down and go. No alignments, balancing, or electrical repairs. A local air compressor service company did just that over and over to the tune of $10,000 in rewinds, every couple weeks. Turns out a $150 set of worn out contact tips ate motors at $30,000 per rewind. It took a couple hours tine to find the problem. They probably spent a thousand for the diagnostic time, but the motor issues stopped. So technically we screwed ourselves.

 

[Wirenuting]

Reactive maintenance costs 300% more. Because of not only lost production (sales) but you’re buying a lot of supplies at premium prices and paying extra for express shipping, emergency rates and overtime. Plus emergency repairs often are patches, not permanent fixes, or a lot of corner cutting goes on.

Study after study has proven this. A lot of companies even with low margin products estimate downtime in thousands of dollars per minute.

PMs initially are a huge eye opener. Once they become routine usually expect a 3% “hit rate” on finding stuff. Think about it…you do a lot of not necessarily cheap work to find one PM out of 30 finds something.

That being said as contractors the most frustrating part is with some customers we find all kinds of issues. We report them and then when we do the PMs again the same stuff is still broken. I’ve been in the unenviable position of sitting on 20 years of PMs pointing to the same issue. Granted it was a $2.5 MM issue and the damage because of it (an ancient worn out analog computer) took 45 days and $15 million to repair. So if you do PMs be prepared to deal with the consequences. It was an easy justification by the way with a 10,000% ROI, just politically embarrassing that the $2.5 MM job kept getting swept under the rug that long.

So look at it from my perspective. We are a motor shop. We make far more money if you just bolt it down and go. No alignments, balancing, or electrical repairs. A local air compressor service company did just that over and over to the tune of $10,000 in rewinds, every couple weeks. Turns out a $150 set of worn out contact tips ate motors at $30,000 per rewind. It took a couple hours tine to find the problem. They probably spent a thousand for the diagnostic time, but the motor issues stopped. So technically we screwed ourselves.

The bean counters see todays savings and don’t worry about tomorrows. That’s the hardest thing about getting preventive maintenance done.
Management thinks of it as “Risk Management” by delaying maintenance.

Remember, Hindsight is always 20/20.

 

[paulengr]

The bean counters see todays savings and don’t worry about tomorrows. That’s the hardest thing about getting preventive maintenance done.
Management thinks of it as “Risk Management” by delaying maintenance.

Remember, Hindsight is always 20/20.

Two different issues. Deferred repair work NEVER saves money. That being said “budgets” in maintenance are a joke. We cannot control costs with budgets. We do that with other more effective tools like PMs, inventory management, etc. Costs are a lagging, not leading, performance indicator. Think about it…vibration analysis says you have misalignment. Refusing to fix it turns into beating failure. Then when the bearing breaks apart and the load slams into the housing damaging it of galling or bending the shaft, how much money did you save?

There is something to be said though for timing. Predictive maintenance lowers costs IF you respond to what it is telling you. If you have an alignment issue or greasing issue, fix it. But it’s not something that’s an emergency outage if addressed in a timely manner on a schedule. Addressing it reduces costs long term.

Second maybe if it’s close to the end of the month you kick it out a week to shift costs but not months. Maintenance managers have a lot if power to reduce costs for better or worse.

 

[glen1971]

 

[DragnUp]

basically, in my world, we PM everything that's electric or electronic to make sure it's working as it should. fire alarms, smoke alarms, rail signals, gas monitors, level alarms, emergency lights, every kind of instrument, probe, and transmitter. motor starter buckets, contactors, grounding, fuses, relays, etc....

as part of my PMs, i like to clean things up. ill make sure everything is well labeled, all the glass is clean, threads are cleaned up and lubed, terminations are good... conduit is well supported... seal tite is intact and not falling apart ... maybe i change out a few lightbulbs while i'm in the area..... hose everything down, sweep it out.... i hate working in an area that's dark, dirty or cluttered. nobody else is going to clean it up, so if i want it cleaned, i have to do it myself....

when i PM an instrument, i make sure the test readings won't affect anything. maybe put it in HOLD or Manual mode...... i do a loop test and make sure that what the instrument thinks is 4/8/12/16/20 mA is actually that value.... i verify the instrument name, the range/span, units (very important), alarm settings, interlock/logic, check the zero if possible... i make sure it's reporting the correct information to the SCADA backend.... make sure the instrument is set back to Automatic mode, or Manual mode, and that it's back online, or "in service."

probes: i pull em out and clean them off and check the wiring and ask the operator if there's been any strange or erratic behaviour..... calibrate it however it's supposed to be calibrated

for example, if i'm PM'ing a thermometer, ill get a heat bath and drop the probe into it to verify the readings for a few different temperatures...

like they said, it's a thankless job. if you don't find a huge discrepancy, then a manager could question the point of the entire PM.

ive got all kinds of checklists for all kinds of PMs....

 

[NLC]

I'm in the states, so that may disqualify my opinion, but if I were you and considering having lighting be part of the PM offering, I couldn't do it in good conscience offering to replace fluorescent and HID lamps and ballasts. I'd offer to at least retrofit any non-working fixtures (or those with dead lamps) to LED. I couldn't sleep at night replacing old fluorescent and HID crap... I know some contractors might enjoy the steady paycheck, but they do so serving their best interests, not their customers'.

 

[JRaef]

I’m in the “pessimist” camp by virtue of being continually disappointed in the general unwillingness of “management” to be willing to get behind the idea of PM. In some industries, repeated COSTLY downtime events have forced the collective acceptance of it, for example most oil, gas and petrochemical industries, because ignoring PM causes things to literally blow up. Yet still, I’ve been to a couple of refineries that ignore it anyway and they DO have events, they pay the fines and lawsuits from the survivors, and apparently consider that to be less expensive than regular PM costs. But many other industries have a “run to destruction” attitude and I’ve had people in those facilities tell me that their owners / managers classify repair costs differently in their accounting systems than they would PM costs, which from a profit and loss standpoint at the end of each fiscal quarter, makes them look better if the costs show up as “emergency repairs” rather than “overhead” maintenance costs. It’s a twisted way to see things but it is pervasive.