Monetary Measures of PdM Impact

If a PdM program is successful the following things happen:

- Cost of maintenance of monitored system goes down

- Cost of PdM (per equipment being monitored with the same technologies) will also go down

- Frequency of monitoring decreases as reliability goes up

- Hours of unscheduled downtime decrease

- Lost opportunity goes down

- Degradation is discovered earlier resulting in better planning for restoration, fewer man hours for restoration and lower cost replacement parts

Tip excerpted from “Predictive Maintenance Management” Course workbook by Jack Nicholas Jr. available at
http://www.masteringmaintenance.com

Register for Jack Nicholas’s PdM Managers Web Workshop Sept 7 - 11 am

There is no maintenance needed on my computer! Or so many think.

We all use and rely heavily on computing daily now and that little fan sucks in an unbelievable amount of dust, and fans on sound cards and CPU’s soon die off early, overheat the board and operate spuriously.

To help prevent this, and assist in cooling also, you can buy one or two more fans for about $5, and fit them so a larger volume of air is removed faster. Also add a cloth, like a CHUX or any medium to act as a filter, covered in a lightweight oil over the areas of the case where air is taken in. Check the cloth after a month and you’ll see what isn’t getting in! Especially if you have your PC/Mac in a dusty environment.

Reader tip provided by Matt Rossiter
Logistic Engineering Services
Kippa-Ring, Queensland
Australia

Thanks Matt - your Reliabilityweb.com stainless steel diamond plate coffee mug is on the way!

Send in your own maintenance tip and get a hat or coffee mug

The 22nd International Maintenance Conference
December 4-7, 2007 - Daytona Beach Florida

By What Method?

We all want to make maintenance improvements but do you know what that means? Most of us use “best efforts” to make our companies better but as quality and reliability Guru W. Edward Deming states “best efforts without knowledge is just best efforts”.

By what method do you plan to make those improvements?

Participate in the International Maintenance Conference and you will gain knowledge about methods you can put to immediate use. You will discover new strategies, new theories, new techniques and new technologies to realize the potential of your workforce and your physical assets.

At IMC-2007 you will:

• Learn the systems you can use to improve reliability

• Discover the causes of failure

• Gain knowledge to appreciate what is required for
reliability

• Understand the people you who will create reliability at your company

Hotel and early bird conference discount available.

Watch for the IMC-2007 in the September issue of Uptime Magazine or please call toll free (888) 575 1245 to request a your IMC-2007 brochure.

Registering 6 or more? Ask About Team Discounts

The only conference with a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee or your money back!

Find out more about IMC-2007 -The 22nd International Maintenance Conference

DC Motor Maintenance Tech Tip

On occasion, repair and maintenance companies will use silicone lead wire or silicone sealant on motor openings in dirty environments. When these items are used with DC electric motors or generators, the silicone vapor, regardless of the amount, will cause rapid wear of brushes and the commutator bars. The carbon and copper dust will permeate the motor armature causing a premature ground or failure.

When having a DC motor repaired, ensure that you specify that no silicone components are to be used.

Howard W Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP
SUCCESS by DESIGN Reliability Services
800 392-9025 ext 201
http://www.motordoc.net

More resources on the Motor Testing Forum

To help with the cross-contamination of your gearbox oils we have used colored stickers on the containers that correspond to the colored stickers on the gearbox that the maintenance people are filling up with oil.

This is very important we you are using synthetic oils, the stickers have the name on them as well.

Reader tip provided by Paul Brooker
Condition Monitoring Technician
Green Triangle Forest Products
Mount Gambier, South Australia

Editor’s Note: All the good reader tips seem to be coming from Australia - good on ya!

Thanks for the tip Paul - your Maintenance-Tips hat is on the way!

Request a free color coded Grease ID system sample

Now you can transform your preventive and predictive maintenance programs into best practices with a new series of training and workshops from Allied Reliability.

Here’s your chance to go behind the scenes and learn how to apply the secrets from the most successful PdM programs - and program managers - in the world.

You’ll find out how this new series of workshops is uniquely different from all the other PdM training you’ve ever seen.

Classes start October 30th in Charleston, South Carolina.

Contact Amy Campbell at: 888-414-5760 to request a special discount for early registration before September 28th.

Find Out More About PM / PdM Best Practices Workshops

A common trap when investigating a problem is to look for the root cause of a problem in the belief that all we need to do is to find and address it, and our problem is solved. Bit like asking why five times and addressing the fifth cause.

It is a bit like looking for the “right solution”, as if there is one right solution and all I need to do is to find it.

Unfortunately, root cause is a misnomer because for any problem there are many causes. It is our ability to identify as many of the main causal paths as possible in order to find an effective solution that prevents recurrence, that meets our goals and is within our control to implement, that will determine a successful RCA.

So avoid use voting systems or consensus as typically these will be steered by the stronger personalities in the group.

Seek to clearly define the problem and understand the cause and effect relationships in a way that others can also understand, and support those causes with evidence, that leads you to possible solutions.

Tip provided by Mick Drew, Director ARMS Reliability Engineers

Find out about about the Apollo Problem Solving Method

The Financial Factor

Funding for new initiatives like an RCM program either comes from a corporate budget, or at the very least may require a corporate-level approval of development expenditures that are resident in a plant budget. You may also find that everyone is apparently positive about the introduction of RCM, but no one is willing to pay for it.

We have all too often heard responses to the effect that “we can’t afford it”. The job then becomes one of convincing the decision-makers that they “can’t afford not to have it”. How is this done?

There are several parameters that influence a credible answer to this question, but the answer in a nutshell is ROI – Return On Investment. What will it cost, and what will e the payback? Let’s examine the ROI question more closely.

There is a need to focus our PM resources (costs) on decreasing the CM incidents (costs) and increasing output (profit) by reducing forced outages (i.e., downtime). This latter factor is by far the big swinger in this financial picture. A brief downtime analysis, based on a very conservative estimate, will place ROI quickly into perspective. We find that all of our clients measure a one-day loss of output in the $100,000 per day range and up – a nuclear plant, for example, must purchase about $800,000 of replacement electricity when it goes unexpectedly off-line for one day. We suggest that a saving of just one day of downtime essentially represents the breakeven point for implementing a comprehensive RCM-based PM program. More realistically, our clients have measured the following benefits (ROI):

· Downtime reductions of 40 percent and up.
· CM cost reductions of 30–50 percent.
· Items of Interest (IOI) paybacks of $100,000 and up.

All of these benefits are annual paybacks. If you agree with these values (or if you wish, only one-half of these values), how can you afford not to implement an RCM program!?

Tip provided by Anthony “Mac” Smith
Author - RCM - Gateway to World Class Maintenance

Find out more about the Anthony “Mac” Smith RCM Workshop on DVD