Efficient Plant February 2020 - 6

column | implementations

Twenty
Reasons
To Stop
Firefighting
Dr. Klaus M. Blache
Univ. of Tennessee Reliability
and Maintainability Center
(RMC)

If your approach to reliability and
maintenance is fixing what's broken, you're
wasting time and money and reducing safety.

Based in Knoxville, Klaus M. Blache is
director of the Reliability & Maintainability
Center at the Univ. of Tennessee, and a
research professor in the
College of Engineering. Contact him at
kblache@utk.edu.

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EP2002implementations.indd 6

NE OF THE most effective
steps you can take to have a positive impact on all areas of your
business and your ROI (return on investment), is to minimize reactive maintenance.
Here are twenty reasons why this is critical:
Emergency repairs can cost three to
more than ten times that of planned maintenance. It's at least six times more expensive to
operate with a highly reactive maintenance
process.
There are also related costly production
losses, since most reactive maintenance
means that the equipment is down. These
losses can be five to 20 times more than the
cost of performing the proper maintenance.
Unplanned repairs are more time
consuming.
Rework due to insufficient root-cause
analysis will result in having to fix it all over
again.
Lack of precision maintenance techniques
causes premature failure of the equipment.
That requires such practices as always applying correct torques and tensions on your components and proper tolerances at operating
temperature. These things are often not done
with precision when in emergency mode.
Backlog will increase since you are using
resources that were originally designated for
other functions.
It's difficult to control costs with a high
number of unexpected failures.
Proper maintenance practices relate to
lower energy costs.
By doing maintenance too often, you are
most likely re-introducing some form of
infant mortality into your equipment. This
may lead to additional reactive maintenance.
Repairs cannot be prioritized and constant rework of schedules makes planning
and scheduling less effective and more costly.
Too often, reactive-maintenance-related
data does not get properly entered into the

maintenance computer system for further
analysis.
High variability in machinery and equipment performance reduces product quality
and product-run effectiveness.
Reactive maintenance increases costs for
spare parts because you are frequently expediting delivery and/or increasing inventory.
Increased reactive maintenance is directly
related to a rise in safety issues.
Running to failure and praising "firefighting" repairs will never change the culture to
following standardized best practices.
Effectively using CBM (condition-based
monitoring) requires a change in culture and
trust of the data being collected. CBM is a
step toward implementing prescriptive maintenance, in which algorithms assign work
orders based on data analysis.
Starting and stopping complex equipment
typically introduces more issues.
Supporting reactive maintenance is
counter to the knowledge that reliability/
maintenance is everyone's responsibility.
Moving from reactive to condition-based
maintenance typically results in an ROI of at
least 10 times.
Cumulatively, all of the negative things
(decreased safety, poor culture, reduced
capacity, increased process variability and
lower quality, and higher cost) tied to reactive
maintenance move your process to a downward spiral.
Top-quartile reactive maintenance in
North America is currently at 9%. My best
practice value is 10% +/- 5%, based on your
type of business and reliability & maintainability process maturity. There are more negative impacts of highly reactive maintenance
practices, but the twenty listed above should
be sufficient to motivate some improvement.
So many parts of your organization can benefit from improving just this one key performance indicator. EP

FEBRUARY 2020

1/28/20 5:41 PM

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Efficient Plant February 2020

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