Up Time Magazine- April/May 2008 - (Page 42) maintenance mgmt upload People Make It Happen The Human Touch is Still a Vital Element by Heinz Bloch, P.E. A s reliability engineers and managers we have read much about benchmarking and life cycle cost methods, and lean and mean specifications, and maintenance cost reduction opportunities. From years of reading we might agree there are reliability improvement systems and these systems are important. Let’s also agree that reliability improvement systems are procedures and work processes, they are methods and approaches. To be of value, these methods must be well-defined, repeatable, and indispensable. In other words, we must implement and diligently use these methods. But today I’m writing about people, and about things we’ve seen done right and things we’ve seen that went wrong. Getting it done right will first and foremost require full cooperation between the three job functions we find in industry: the Operators, the Maintenance and the Project-Technical employees. They each fulfill an important role; they must cooperate like the three legs of a barstool. Shorten one leg and you tend to slide off. Shorten it some more and the barstool won’t even stand up. Remove one leg completely and it no longer serves any purpose – it has become useless. equipment condition. He might touch a bearing housing and report that it’s unusually hot. He may see leakage from a mechanical seal. He may smell smoke, or hear an unusual noise from the reciprocating compressor behind him. Operating technicians are our eyes and ears and nose. Whether you value them or hold them of no account is your choice. I know from experience that good operators are irreplaceable. The Maintenance Function But we should not dwell only on the operating technician’s job functions and job responsibilities. The maintenance worker is equally important; he or she must do the job properly. As we look at Figure 2, certain shortcomings should be obvious. The installer or dismantler certainly was not supposed to use a sledgehammer on the coupling hub. So, why the evident abuse? Using the Five Senses to Monitor Condition Throwing money at a problem rarely works, and many articles and supporting graphs have testified to that fact. Money and people cannot be used interchangeably. No amount of money can replace a good operating technician. The operators are our eyes and ears. While it appears the operator in Figure 1 is taking vibration data, remember that he or she can take data on 100 pumps and find not a single one that vibrates excessively. So, in fact, the technician here monitors Figure 2 - An abused coupling hub. Note the lack of puller holes on this hub. Provide them! Figure 1 - Condition monitoring goes well beyond taking vibration data. The data taker also notices unusual smells, sounds, temperatures, leakage, etc. Well, it’s because there are no puller holes. Is that because your specification did not call for them? Is it because your Purchasing Agent bought the coupling from the lowest bidder? Or because you did not have a detailed checklist that says “Verify there are puller april/may 2008 42
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