It sounds innocuous enough, and who would argue about setting proper lubrication schedules and cleaning regimes right?
Yet in the RCM analyses that we regularly perform this belief in basic maintenance is one of the largest contributors to over-maintenance, inefficient use of resources, and in some cases increases in downtime and risk of failure
Basic maintenance generally means adopting manufacturers guidance, performing basic lubrication, and performing regular inspections or maintenance observations.
There are three fundamental issues with this.
- First, manufacturers are rarely steeped in the thinking, processes and knowledge required to develop accurate maintenance regimes.
- Second, it promotes maintaining the asset instead of the function, and
- Third, with no guide to adhere to it often results in over-greasing of the motors, bearings chains and other moving parts. Sometimes with production impacts.
Manufacturers and maintenance
Original Equipment Manufacturers, OEM's, are fantastic at designing products, and often in providing information related to basic maintenance.
But thats where it stops... there are very real reasons why product manufacturers are not always to right ones to recommend maintenance regimes.
- There is a hole in their knowledge. They give you the asset, you break it, and nobody tells them why / when / how / contributing factors etcetera. THis is exceptionally common and is the reason why manufacturers often are not able to provide reliable failure data from field use.
- They do not understand your operating context. They will recommend use based on standard operating uses, or an average operating use. But they don't realise that you are going to use it (say) as one of three centrifuges with only one duty needed at any one time.
- They have a different operating model. OEM's, generally, are focused on selling products and avoiding court cases. So any maintenance they will recommend will be at the thick end of conservative. Often time even to the point where the asset could not possibly run properly if everything that was recommended was done.
Maintaining the Asset
This is a dramatic issue and one I have come across regularly over the past twenty years. In the LNG space I had a company with two duty pumps and a standby pump. They were of course performing condition monitoring on all of them.
Yet we could easily show that this was a waste of resources as the results from this, or from doing nothing for this failure mode, were exactly the same.
Recently I worked with a Water Utility with three centrifuges. They stripped down each of them every 18months for their time based overhaul, which was a significant cost.
Yet they used one of them for 66% of the operating time, and split the remaining 34% between the other two centrifuges. Not only this but there was only 5% of the operating time where they needed to run two centrifuges together.
We were able to totally scrap the overhaul processes, after much proving the case, for a dramatic reduction in direct costs.
Both of these are examples of "basic maintenance". Do what the manufacturer tells you, make sure not to miss greasing regimes, and focus on cleaning.
The result? Higher costs and no change to reliability or performance.
I will deal with grease regimes in a separate post later on.