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6:23 pm
February 9, 2017
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Should You Care About MRO Spare Parts?

By on February 9, 2017 in MRO 0

Without a comprehensive process in place, managing MRO spare parts can seem like an arcade game, where, as soon as one issue or cost is knocked down, another pops up.

By Dr. Klaus M. Blache, Univ. of Tennessee Reliability & Maintainability Center

Purchasing and inventory costs associated with maintenance/repair/operations (MRO) can consume more than 50% of a plant’s total maintenance budget. Based on what I’ve observed in more than 100 facilities, however, spare-parts inventory reductions of 10% to 50% are possible. Sadly, given the many, often hidden, costs related to such parts—and the fact that they can surface in departments with conflicting goals—the urgency for reducing them isn’t always fully understood or a priority.

Without a comprehensive process in place, trying to get a handle on spare-parts management is like playing “Whac-A-Mole.” As soon as you knock down one issue or cost, another pops up. There are many ways to save money in this area, though. Consider these questions with regard to your operations:

• Would you have adequate MRO parts if your production volume increased?

• Are spares automatically reordered using a trigger point or mathematical algorithm?

• Have you performed an ABC/XYZ analysis based on cost of parts and inventory turnover?

• How well does your CMMS system integrate with purchasing, Bills of Materials (BOMs), and your inventory system?

• How secure is your stockroom? Are all removed items recorded?

• What controls are in place to limit what inventories should go into storage?

• Is a supplier providing turnkey services? If so, are you sure it can supply adequate/timely spare parts?

• What improvement has resulted from using metrics to control MRO spare parts?

Answers from many sites won’t be encouraging. As Phillip Slater noted in his book, Spare Parts Inventory Management (Industrial Press, Lilburn, GA, 2017), “Almost 50% of companies have no specific set of policies that have been designed for day-to-day application in helping them manage their spare-parts inventory.”

Doing nothing isn’t a good option as it also costs money. Carrying costs in most plants are between 20% and 30%. (I’ve found that a few places have lower carrying costs and that values sometimes will be significantly higher based on the part.) Carrying costs include the cost of money, taxes, insurance, handling, inventory control, storage, obsolescence, theft, counterfeits, and more. Numerous groups use 25% as a rule of thumb. This means that if a facility takes no action, in four years it will have paid for its parts inventory twice.

MRO spare parts reflect millions of dollars’ worth of opportunities that can improve an organization’s bottom line. Begin uncovering yours by performing an inventory of all parts at your site, including informal stockpiles throughout the plant and those boneyards of “just in case” stuff. Then, if your facility lacks a comprehensive process for managing these parts, make sure appropriate personnel:

• Spend time with the key stakeholders (at the plant-floor level) to perform a criticality spare-parts analysis considering the impact on items such as safety, production, cost, and lead time.

• Develop a parts-holding strategy, i.e., on-site inventory crib or open stocking, share the spares with other plants, supplier-held parts, order on demand, and the like, based on the criticality analysis and business risks.

• Better understand complete parts costs and the sources of hidden costs. Then apply the knowledge implementing prevention and optimization with an Asset Life Cycle approach (see “Life-Cycle Costing: Why So Difficult?” maintenancetechnology.com/2016/09/life-cycle-costing-difficult/).

• Develop and communicate a plan to identify/avoid counterfeit parts. Put the necessary wording into your purchasing specifications to protect against counterfeits.

Optimization tools and related analytics are helpful, but it’s your overall process and culture that will sustain improvements. That’s how you’ll improve equipment availability, reduce your operating costs, and gain a competitive advantage. Care about your MRO spare parts and they’ll take care of you. MT

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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402

5:28 pm
August 6, 2015
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A Contrarian View: Making Silk Purses

By on August 6, 2015 in 2015 0

By Heinz P. Bloch, P.E.

As bubonic plague ravaged much of Europe, a wise man apparently shared a common-sense parable that involved man’s inability to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. Shakespeare is said to have picked up on this idea and (possibly) mentioned it in one of his late 16th-century plays. As evidenced by two more recent examples from the real world, it’s clear that industrial operations don’t always understand the moral of this parable.

In the first example, the reference to making a silk purse from a sow’s ear should have been on at least one reliability professional’s mind when, in the late 1980s, he attended a National Petrochemical and Refiners Association (NPRA) Reliability and Maintenance Conference. (This conference has been rebranded and now runs as an American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers [AFPM] event in San Antonio.) We’ll call our conference attendee Maxwell—which, of course, is not his real name.

What’s real is that Maxwell was a dynamic, young reliability manager at a large petrochemical company who sat in on a conference session I conducted. During this presentation, I explained how and why my employer at the time—a world-scale ethylene plant similar to Maxwell’s—had safely stretched its shutdown/turnaround intervals to seven years (Those intervals are now 10 years.)

Evidently, Maxwell focused solely on the words “seven years,” and may have been enjoying an extended coffee break as I discussed what our ethylene plant did to achieve its seven-year shutdown/turnaround intervals. Investing in lube-oil purification and up-front MQA (machinery quality assurance) were among my topics.

Returning to his plant, Maxwell began to advocate the doubling of turnaround intervals. Unfortunately, a variety of calamitous events beset the facility as it tried to meet this goal. While foresight and a budget for true reliability engineering had allowed my employer to become “Best in Class,” his employer struggled on its reliability journey. When upper management realized that few of Maxwell’s lofty ideas materialized and that unscheduled shutdowns made the facility uncompetitive, he was terminated.

My second real-world example begins with a letter I received.

“I’m temporarily located in a Middle East country as part of a team supporting project engineers in the EPC (engineering/procurement/construction) contractor’s office,” wrote a reliability engineer. “The scope of my involvement is a bit unclear. I’m supposed to keep an eye on the important items and make sure the rotating equipment for the project will be a) reliable, b) easy to maintain, c) within budgeted cost, and d) delivered on time. Still, our project engineers often express annoyance and view our team’s work product as interference instead of value-adding. For example, because user experience was a main criterion on important pumps, I had recommended a particular feed pump. Focusing on applicable experiences, we should have placed the order with a well-qualified Italian manufacturer. But our EPC contractor is headquartered in a Pacific Rim country and wants to buy equipment from that part of the world. Invariably, the EPC’s choice is lowest initial cost, which pleases the project manager although it usually satisfies only item (c) in my role statement.”

This reliability engineer’s anguish is understandable. He had been hired after others made questionable decisions. His employer didn’t realize that thoughtful bid evaluations must consider the value of maintenance and downtime cost avoidance.

Granted, the value of such avoidance strategies is viewed differently from country to country. A timely review of various bidders for this site’s feed pumps would have indicated that the Italian vendor had far more applicable experience than the others.

Alas, as this and similar stories from industry so often go, it’s too late to do what’s right. Much money will flow into trying to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. Then, the plant will change owners. MT

heinzbloch@gmail.com

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344

6:34 pm
June 12, 2015
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A Contrarian View: Standards, Sensors, Squirrels, Unintended Consequences

By on June 12, 2015 in 2015, Automation, Sensors 0

By Heinz P. Bloch, P.E.

Several months ago, I happened to look at API-618. In the process, I noted that this venerable standard covering reciprocating compressors had grown from 34 pages to 39 (in 1974), to 111 pages (1986), to 166 pages (1995). There’s been at least one edition since—I don’t know how many pages it currently comprises. Standards and edicts will be with us for a while. Adhering to them will be expensive, as will not adhering. Take your pick. Consider the following example.

Some jurisdictions in Texas require certification (and fees) before a lawn-sprinkler servicing company can do business. In Harris County, where I spend much of the year, sprinkler systems must include rain sensors. If it rains, these systems either shut down or won’t start. If there’s no precipitation, the cycle timer calls for the sprinkler to run, and it will. Unfortunately, the sprinkler doesn’t know that it might start raining in, say, about an hour.

Even as rain threatens, my cycle-timed sprinkler system starts and dispenses water. If the sky opens up a little later, sprinkling earlier will have been a waste. When I’m home and listening to (and trusting) the weather report, I can save money and precious resources by deferring the sprinkler’s run to the following day. While no great harm is done up to that point, problems can arise later.

That’s what happened with a mature oak tree that once graced my front lawn. It provided ample shade and likely saved in excess of $200 on my yearly air-conditioning bill. Last December, the tree suddenly lost its leaves: It had died from lack of water, and needed to be removed by a commercial landscaper.

With the cooperation of the previous homeowner, it was determined that a single pair of low-voltage wires running from the rain sensor to the sprinkler system’s control module had caught the attention of a neighborhood squirrel. One of the wires was chewed through—probably in mid-2014.

That squirrel had caused a chain of events costing close to $2,000 for tree removal and a tiny replacement tree. The $2,000 does not include the likely incremental power that will be consumed over the next decade. That’s what it will take until my small and unimpressive replacement tree provides a measure of shade.

The above experiences led to several observations, some of them astute and others, perhaps, not so astute.

  • Not all standards improve with successive editions.
  • Prevailing sprinkler legislation makes little sense if it starts raining right after a sprinkler system completes its running cycle.
  • A small animal can cost you more than prevailing legislation will have saved you in the past or will save you in the future.
  • The unintended consequences of installing an instrument can cause grief and/or waste energy. It may even do harm to the very environment it was expected to protect.
  • I should have used a checklist. Checklists are useful for preventive maintenance in plant environments and around the house.
  • I should have acted on my distrust of squirrels or acquired a taste for them. The process operators at my former employer’s OXY-Unit in Baton Rouge, LA, did just that. In mid-1971, they invited me to share lunch, but suggested I not ask what was in the stew. They had a way of taking care of pesky squirrels, raccoons, and opossums.
  • Rain-sensor wiring at 2,300 V would keep squirrels off my property.

If you wonder about my agenda, I don’t have one. I trust you will draw your own conclusions. MT

heinzpbloch@gmail.com

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407

6:09 pm
April 1, 2015
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A Contrarian View: Rediscovering And Forgetting Lessons Learned

By on April 1, 2015 in Uncategorized 0

By Heinz P. Bloch, P.E.

The term “integrally geared compressor” describes equipment consisting of a large-diameter, direct-driven input gear (the “bull gear”) and one or more (to a maximum of six) driven, smaller-diameter pinions. Because each pinion end can be fitted with a bladed impeller, 12 stages of compression can be obtained. When a reader asked about the feasibility of using variable-speed drives for these integrally geared machines, we advised against it because an infinite number of resonant vibration frequencies could harm one or more of the slender, three-dimensional, contour-machined impeller blades.

The answer generated feedback. One reader recalled an interesting installation he encountered while working for a major manufacturer in the 1990s. He was visiting a customer in South America with a steam turbine-driven Plant Air Package (PAP) compressor. This workhorse was a fine, integrally geared unit with a successful 1-, 2- or 3-stage design dating from the 1960s.

The reader’s company had quoted a digital control system for the PAP, but the customer chose to purchase a more expensive one from an independent third-party. Asked why, the customer explained that the owners were adjusting the turbine speed to move the operating curve and meet plant demand at a more optimal efficiency. There were other advantages, to be sure, but when he was warned that the equipment could be operating near resonance on occasion, the customer didn’t seem concerned. The reader added that he wondered how the customer’s machine had operated in the years since.

This discussion, in turn, reminded me of a legal deposition I attended that involved testimony by an OEM vice president. The gentleman explained calmly—and truthfully—that his company routinely rediscovered and forgot “lessons learned” in 30-year cycles. Some end-user organizations exhibit similar tendencies: They, too, have short memories and work in cycles.

From personal experience, I am familiar with PAPs owned by the affiliates of a major multi-national petrochemical company. We believed in simple controls for them. The experienced manufacturer of these compressors gave the correct advice when cautioning against running PAPs at variable speed—no criticism there. Even the most impressive electronic controls might not be able to track changes in blade resonance due to a mighty combination of compressor fouling, blade erosion and the failing memory of a night shift after celebrating whatever it is that night shifts have occasionally celebrated.

I am also somewhat familiar, from personal experience, with wisdom, and the lack thereof. Wisdom is the application of knowledge. In short, all people with wisdom have knowledge, but not all people with knowledge have wisdom. And so it is that we get ourselves in trouble when we encounter a lack of either knowledge or wisdom. Wisdom must be acquired via the laborious “gaining-knowledge-through-learning” route. Alas, learning takes effort, and not everyone is willing to expend such effort.

In summary, much of whatever knowledge or wisdom we might acquire through decades of work, including in the reliability arena, may: a) not be passed on to others; b) fall prey to operations that are being encouraged to be “lean and mean”—often mistakenly viewed as an invitation to use shortcuts; c) not be acknowledged by those who are embarrassed by their own oversights and mistakes; and d) in the case of success, may not be cleared for publication for fear of giving away competitive advantage. This gets us back to our original point: We, too, wonder how that South American PAP-user fared in the long run. MT

heinzbloch@gmail.com

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451

10:34 pm
February 18, 2015
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A Contrarian View: Not Grooming Your Successor is Poor Policy

By on February 18, 2015 in 2015 0

By Heinz P. Bloch, P.E.

The last 25 years or so have seen a shift in the way mid-level managers are designated or selected by their superiors. Until about 1990, managers needed to have successors in place before they themselves would be promoted. If, despite not having groomed successor, a manager received a promotion, he or she would have to live with the consequences.

An unqualified successor will render his or her former boss ineffective. Without grooming competent successors, entire organizations often spend time re-discovering what others have already learned and leveraged. They then make decisions that don’t take into account the collective—prior or present—knowledge of serious professionals. That knowledge may be as simple and valuable as mapping the best available approach to solving a problem.

My two former employers (from 1962 until 1986) had highly qualified mechanical engineers in section-head and department-manager positions. They made decisions and gave guidance with the company’s long-range goals in mind. Whenever their reliability engineers determined that equipment upgrading was both feasible and cost-justified, they implemented suitable remedies. Doing so reduced maintenance intensity and increased plant profitability.

Regrettably, some of today’s reliability managers have backgrounds quite unrelated to the reliability-improvement business. They neglect to put in place an organizational structure that views every maintenance event as an opportunity to upgrade. Sadly, the pitfalls of managers not understanding the long-term reliability benefits of sound guidance and training were recently (and again) brought to our attention.

Lack of guidance and “no budget” affected a large corporation that had assigned a young instrument-and-electrical (I&E) specialist to solve costly, randomly occurring repeat failures on large, multi-casing twin-screw gas compressors. Unfortunately, the compressor OEM failed to respond to this inexperienced employee’s calls for assistance, thus impeding his effectiveness. Finding a solution to the equipment’s problems was further thwarted when the company’s project engineers issued a purchase order for an exact-duplicate compressor. That move essentially wiped out whatever leverage the I&E specialist might have had with the manufacturer.

From experience, we know that elusive compressor problems are best addressed in meetings attended by the user, the manufacturer and an independent third party. Convening at the manufacturer’s headquarters, the participants can discover any prototype-like features or design oversights. Because all machinery failures, without exception, are attributable to one of only seven (well-publicized) cause categories, the user company’s participating reliability professional can communicate with the manufacturer face-to-face and eliminate five or even six categories in succession. The reliability pro then steers the meeting to concentrate on the one or two remaining categories—and, together, the parties identify the root causes of the problems. In these types of meetings, the equipment owner’s representative insists on disclosure of references: “Where have such compressors been used before? Let’s verify their operating experience!”

In the example of the ineffective I&E specialist above, whoever headed the site’s reliability group in the past may have been remiss in not first enabling and then empowering a successor. In this case, we are probably looking at a company trying to solve a compressor problem that’s costing millions of “unbudgeted” dollars. Assigning the project to a lone employee with no solid, major-machinery background—and no support from experienced consultants (“there’s no budget for that”)—will only prolong the agony.

Our advice to managers is straightforward: Enlist the most knowledgeable consulting firms you can find to help solve these types of problems. Harness their expertise to assist your brightest employees, and then groom those employees as your future subject-matter experts. In the process, you will grow an invaluable pool of professionals to replace managers who, for a variety of reasons, cannot give the right guidance. MT

heinzpbloch@gmail.com

Editor’s Note: The print edition of this article included incorrect contact information. This version has been corrected.

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1460

3:05 pm
January 13, 2015
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Why Single-Sourcing is Bad

By on January 13, 2015 in Asset Management, Management 0

Responding to feedback from the field, our “Contrarian View” columnist explains why narrowing your supply-chain choices is a surefire way to choke off innovation.

By Heinz Bloch, P.E.

When a large, West-Coast refinery decided to purchase from a single provider of mechanical seals, it experienced problems because the supplier did not have technical parity in all applications. This resulted in the maintenance department eventually having to deal with second and third suppliers of the mechanical seals they needed before acceptable performance and reliability was achieved in all pumping services.

In a similar example, a facility that began purchasing 100% of its mechanical seals from vendor “A” saw the error of its ways when a machinery engineer explained to management why single-sourcing was not in the facility’s best interest. The company listened. Now vendor “A” has an 86% slice of the seal population, vendor “B” has 10%, and vendor “C” accounts for the remaining 4%. The three vendors compete on the basis of long-term reliability and performance—to everyone’s advantage. Why? Because it’s common business sense that ideas thrive on competition.

Consider an often-cited example of an oil refinery with thousands of process pumps. Supplying mechanical seals for just a small fraction of these units, say 4% or 160 pumps in an operation with 4000 pumps, even company “C” would see an incentive for staying in the game. Chances are that Vendor “C” would probably assign its most talented people to be the technology resource for this customer, maybe becoming mentors to its future reliability professionals.

Innovators reap the reward

In a single-source world, one might wonder how suppliers could gain essential operating experience if leading companies would not purchase first-of-a-kind offerings with advanced performance and features. Leading end-users, in fact, have a responsibility in this regard, even if it means assuming a certain level of risk. If they have the technical savvy to evaluate an offer, for example, they should help develop and proof-test new or properly extrapolated designs. If they don’t fulfill this role, the job could fall to companies without sufficient technical expertise to test prototypes—a losing proposition in many instances and expensive for all parties involved.

Real leaders must try new things from their suppliers, even though they may be doing business with the competition at the same time. There need not be any deception in this practice. But there is also none of the “we deal only with our alliance partners” approach, which discourages the competition from trying for any of your business. The truth is that the competition is very likely to have a better idea, so it’s unwise to shut yourself off from what could be a valuable opportunity for improvement.

A good example—one this author has referenced many times—is the eventual switch to the use of plant-wide oil mist. In the late 1960s, this practice was not common. It has since been understood to be the best long-term lubrication method for process pumps and electric motor bearings. Today, more than 27,000 electric motors (and 130,000 pumps) are connected to oil-mist systems. Some of these motors have operated without bearing replacement from 1978 until today.

Again, oil mist is but one of many “new” technologies that, over time, became fully accepted and integrated into industrial practice. Which technologies will be next?

Recent information about diffusion-conversion technology, for example, long used to impart high hardness and wear resistance in diesel-engine truck turbochargers, suggests this technology may be able to solve wear issues in hot-service process pumps at oil refineries, in tar sand processing facilities and in pipeline service. Innovators faced with this type of option should have little reluctance evaluating the potential advantage of diffusion-conversion treatments on the steel impellers of pumps. There would also be virtually no downside to trying diffusion-conversion in the sleeve bearing or journal surfaces of many positive displacement pumps or on oil rings in typical pump bearing housings and on many other wear surfaces.

We can be sure that leading end-user companies have reached (and continue to maintain) best-of-class status because they allow such “controlled innovation,” and have consistently used the best available technology long before others caught on. Limiting discourse to a single supplier is rarely—if ever—the most effective approach to lowering maintenance cost and improving equipment reliability.

The same is true for service

The single-source approach has drawbacks with regard to service providers, too. For example, when a world-renowned U.S. chemical company de-
cided to single-source many of its services, including machine shop work and control-valve testing, small local businesses which had grown and thrived by being responsive to the chemical giant’s needs found themselves locked out. The results were predictable: Instead of using a local machine shop, repairs were entrusted to vendors in major out-of-state cities.

This resulted in trucking delays, the need to make shipping crates, the need to factor in extra transit time when planning, and the need to arrange for appropriate quality-control inspection, among other issues. Vendors in reasonable proximity to the corporation’s main facility who had demonstrated outstanding responsiveness were now even deprived of the opportunity to submit bids. Repair and replacement work was handed over to a national center that was supposed to be responsive but, in fact, did not measure up to the challenge.

These results could have been predicted. The survival of smaller local suppliers, seemingly more expensive at first glance, was now in question. Those local suppliers were at risk, and the chemical company realized little to no gain. Management had not accounted for delays, added administration costs and the need for expediting. They also had not factored in the negative impact their decision would have on members of their own business community.

Informed choices are key

More than ever, the decision to single-source is often made by uninformed people. Those who defend this approach typically miss the point about how closely reliability and profitability are related. It’s true that whatever a principled professional or leading corporation does should be driven and motivated by the desire to make profits while providing value and quality. But profitability is best achieved with reliable equipment, which is best served by using multiple sources of supply. This approach promotes competition, innovation and the ethical treatment of others—which is another way of saying, “Let’s work together.” MT

Heinz Bloch currently resides in Westminster, CO. His professional career includes long-term assignments as Exxon Chemical’s Regional Machinery Specialist for the United States. Bloch holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and has authored more than 600 publications. He is an ASME Life Fellow. Contact him at heinzpbloch@gmail.com.

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1994

7:29 pm
December 1, 2014
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A Contrarian View: What Being Proactive Really Means

By on December 1, 2014 in Reliability, Reliability Engineering, Uncategorized 0

By Heinz Bloch, P.E.

A company I choose to call NTBO (“Not-To-Be-Offended”) will long remember a string of expensive pump failures that jeopardized the continuity of boiler feed water supplied to its power generation turbines. When all components were carefully measured, it was determined that the oil-slinger concentricity exceeded maximum allowable by a factor of 30. Oil slingers (cone-shaped collars on revolving shafts designed to return passing oil outward to the point of origin) are critically important components, but I don’t know if NTBO implemented the specification and inspection routines needed to capitalize on this costly experience.

Capitalizing on an event means not doing the same dumb things all over again. In NTBO’s case, bringing 30- or 40-year-old rotating machinery back to original tolerances should be one of this company’s priority tasks. In fact, the next shutdown might include retrofitting fluid machinery with more efficient blades, impellers, vanes, improved lube delivery, superior filtration and the like.

The time to be thoroughly proactive is NOW. Today is the best time to communicate with competent upgrade shops; or to write an oil-slinger-ring specification requiring stress-relieving (annealing) before finish-machining; or to find out if better reciprocating-compressor valves are available and cost-justified; or to determine if excessive pipe stress on the discharge nozzle of P-207 warrants pre-fabricating a spool piece for insertion between points A and B during the plant shutdown scheduled for later in the year.

Repeat failures in a plant should be thought of as management failures, plain and simple. Someone in management needs to hire, nurture or groom people who know that the above activities are among the hundreds of proactive tasks that fit under various subheadings in role statements for responsible reliability professionals. One such task is to keep current a list of actions that could be carried out if an unanticipated downtime event were to occur.

Say, for instance, the reliability manager tells you that one of your plant’s process units has just shut down because of a pipe rupture. He tells his engineers and technicians that unit restart is scheduled in 30 hours. A proactive reliability employee might, for example, immediately look at his/her two-day-opportunity list that prioritizes coupling replacement in P-207 B, followed by the addition of 24 pre-fabricated hydraulic tubing lines to 12 electric motors on pre-defined process pumps already hooked up to the plant-wide oil mist system.

But it’s a two-way street. A competent manager creates role statements and training plans for his employees. For their part, the reliability professionals reporting to this manager make sure they arrive at work knowing what tasks they will perform (on a “normal” day) in harmony with their defined roles. As they then return home at the end of the day, these professionals should ask themselves if they have added value and if—should they ever leave their current jobs—the present manager or employer would notice they were no longer there.

Granted, if you work for a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, the corporation’s end-of-year profit statement probably wouldn’t be directly affected by your presence or departure. But your group or section or department should notice if or when you’re no longer around.

So make a difference. Whether you’re a manager or a junior contributor, strive to be above average. Be self-motivated and proactive. Offer facts that comport with common sense and the laws of science. As I’ve mentioned before, anecdotes add nothing but wasted time. Factual information translated into cost-justified actions adds value. MT

heinzbloch@gmail.com

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1185

4:13 pm
August 1, 2014
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A Contrarian View: Manage Your Management Problems

By on August 1, 2014 in Homepage-Right-Side, Management, Work Processes 0

By Heinz Bloch, P.E.

“Manage” was the blunt advice I recently gave an audience of reliability engineers. Earlier, someone from the audience had asked what should be done when “persons unknown” insist on doing things their own way. In his plant, unknown persons are apparently connecting a plant-wide oil-mist system to ordinary compressed air (plant air) instead of dry instrument air.

At first, I volunteered to return with a few bottles of expensive holy water that could be sprinkled on all bearing housings at the referenced plant. When the audience groaned, I reconsidered and said that exposing the bearings to wet plant air instead of dry instrument air would cause sludge formation. Sludge—a composite of rust, dust and water—is not good for bearings. That statement gets us first to an analogy and, a few lines later, to the entire point of this column.

Suppose a member of a plant’s fleet-maintenance team drained the lube oil from a vehicle engine and replaced it with an equivalent volume of sulfuric acid. The manager in charge would probably give the mechanic some counseling, arrange for considerable mind-altering retraining or simply find an outside-the-gate job (with zero future impact on equipment reliability) for the acidifier. My tongue-in-cheek point is also a serious plea: Manage for future reliability. Withdraw your support from the unteachable. Waste little time on the incorrigibly disgruntled. Manage like a manager.

Managing like a manager includes gathering information from others, of course. But, as a manager, beware of information based on mere opinion. While everybody is entitled to an opinion, smart managers will elicit facts and act on facts. Let me share another recent example:

Speaking to about 30 fellow employees, a young engineer claimed that plant-wide oil-mist lubrication is not cost-justified at their 2000-plus-pump facility. I let the audience know that some 37 years ago, a prominent engineering journal had published my article on the success of using pure oil mist for lubricating electric motor bearings. As of 2014, in excess of 26,000 motors (and close to 150,000 pumps) are lubricated in this manner. The motors range in horsepower from 2 to 1250; some of them have not had bearings replaced in the past 35 years.

That young, opinionated engineer was clearly dealing with anecdotal information. Had his cost-justification calculation taken into account the many thousands of oil-mist-lubricated electric motor drivers that have been in regular use since the mid-1960s, the picture he presented to his management would have been drastically different. Regrettably, his employer is not unique in allowing uninformed opinions to drive decisions with significant impact on safety, reliability and bottom-line maintenance.

So why doesn’t the reliability manager at that plant—or one of his/her superiors—ask why the competition is highly satisfied with oil mist? Or ask for authoritative data on why “they” but not “we” successfully use mature, decades-old technology? To some, that’s an iconoclastic suggestion. Finding the true answer, however, can greatly accelerate an entire corporation’s reliability achievements. Reasonable managers, therefore, will seek commonsense, factual answers.

Likewise, effective managers would probably not countenance the following situation in their plants: Two mechanics recently told me they liked failures because repair work puts overtime pay in their pockets. It appears their management hasn’t asked enough questions—nor emphasized the point that equipment failures can cause havoc.

Good managers, in fact, might demonstrate that workers’ paychecks can get even bigger when failure-avoidance is rewarded. In such a case, future generations will thank everyone for adding value instead of just jogging in place. MT

heinzbloch@gmail.com

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