Maintenance Technology April 2017 - 16

PLANT PROFILE

to get experience while they are going
to school."
The program is responsible for
hiring 24 trainees, to date, and has been
able to place 18 of them in full-time
positions within Lilly maintenance
groups. The remaining six trainees are
still in the initial stage of the program.
The training also uses basic maintenance programs provided by Motion
Industries and Armstrong. Last year,
there were more than 30 well-attended
training classes focused on equipment
used at Lilly. The company wants the
training to be relevant to what the
maintenance technicians perform on a
daily basis.
"The whole condition-based platform
makes us unique," Wenzel said. "We
have all the failure-analysis competencies. It's a one-stop shop. We provide
two-to-three day courses on conditionbased technologies for crafts and
engineers. The whole understanding, as
far as what maintenance and reliability
can do, is to increase wrench time and
uptime. We are all seeing an uptake in
technology."

Best practices
Overbey stated that his main responsibility is to help the various sitemaintenance groups improve uptime by
using diagnostic tools to identify root
causes of lingering problems. With a
focus on training paying dividends, he
said the high-quality people are what
make the condition-based monitoring
team successful.
The team works with the sitemaintenance groups to reduce unexpected failures, so increased time can
be focused on preventive maintenance.
"We look at our asset-replacement value
as a function of our total maintenance
scheme," Wenzel said. "We look at
recapitalization and make sure we are
reinvesting in our facility. We keep track
of where we are with proactive maintenance. Those numbers are tracked
facility to facility and then rolled into a
global metric."
Vibration analysis and using infrared
technology has become a central part of
the department's reliability efforts.

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MAINTENANCE TECHNOLOGY

Advanced production technology is critical to the standard of reliability excellence.

"These guys have taken responsibility
for the failure-analysis lab and taken it
on as an added-value service," Wenzel
said. "For example, if there is a failed
bearing, they take it out, cut it up,
and provide a report that goes back to
management. If we make a call that
a piece of equipment has increased
vibration levels and is on the path to
failure, based on the vibration data
collected, getting those bearings goes a
long way in getting site buy-in when the
actual bearing problem can be visually
observed. Most individuals are skeptical
when shown the vibration waveform
(squiggly lines), seeing the bearing with
the anomaly is the true test of obtaining
their buy in."
"We can compete with anyone in

terms of oil analysis," Wenzel added.
"We can identify particles and have
switched to synthetics. For example,
when oil gets dirty, it becomes acidic.
Something slightly acidic can be more
harmful than something that is highly
acidic because it will just continue
to eat away at the material and cause
significant damage before you can stop
it. Something slightly acidic can really
tear up bearings. The FluidScan 1100
can detect that."
More than 80% of the oil samples
are now handled internally, Wenzel
said. "As we are selling all of these
capabilities to the PdM team around
the world, we are starting to look at
some of the potential issues at other
facilities to provide extra analysis with
APRIL 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Maintenance Technology April 2017