Is there life after the death of predictive maintenance?
It is sad how quickly a good predictive maintenance program dies, even though the program has gotten a manager promoted, convinced you and others that there is a lot of value in doing PdM to improve maintenance practices, saved money and gained credibility.
The demise of a good program is usually due to the loss of the program champion. He was promoted because he saved tons of money and improved his maintenance practices – just overall improved the company’s bottom line. With a new department manager, the program fundamentally has started from the beginning. The new leader may not have any experience in the PdM world and cannot identify the need for continuing the process; he just sees costs for new equipment, training, equipment calibration, equipment upgrades, etc. In today’s world, with such a severe downturn, this is even more prevalent. Cutting costs for everything is the rule – it’s a shortsighted rule, but it’s one that we live by today and will probably live by into the near future.
The new department manager may just see the loss of an electrician or millwright, the people side of things. He has seen plenty of good workers disappear to retirement or leave for another job or get pulled out of the department to work in other parts of the plant. So, he sees his PdM people as being involved with non-value-added work when they could best be used somewhere else in the department or to satisfy his manpower-sharing commitment. The new manager also sees his people as being needed to keep the machinery producing, so preventive maintenance work and breakdown work are the priority, especially PM work, which he feels is much more important. That is due to the fact that PM completion is a measurement management has deemed as important, a key performance indicator which impacts monetary gains for the manager. PdM doesn’t. Therefore, doing PMs makes sense because it affects his bottom line.
One thing we forget is that the manager is human, too, driven by a different set of rules, most we are not aware of and don’t fully understand. We somehow have to come to terms with that reality because it is now our reality as well.
In this environment, the infrared thermographer, vibration analyst and motor testing personnel press on because they all have developed a fan base that knows what their technologies can do and have bought them in to their day-to-day processes – to the point of building PMs for a lot of their equipment using the different PdM technologies. They know that the information generated is extremely important for them to make informed decisions. So these PMs need to be performed. They add value. So, they always get done to the benefit of the department.
All of the people who rely on the PdM analyst to give them needed data are the new champions of the PdM process. They continue to rely on this information. The analysts know this as well and they continue to perform their duties, though they are somewhat frustrated because it seems to them as if their efforts are not being rewarded.
Then you get moved to the Central PdM Group – heaven. You get to do the work you love all of the time.
May you be successful in your career in your chosen field. I hope you find it very rewarding
Please respond to this blog post with your comments, questions, and stories of predictive maintenance success and failure.
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Filed Under: Featured, Maintenance Excellence | Tags: business management, infrared thermography, maintenance management, motor circuit testing, predictive maintenance, vibration analysis
Comments
By JPA on October 22nd, 2009 at 8:35 am
My goodness I could have written this. I was the champion and had an enterprise wide program within a large corp. Reliability engineers, every PdM technology, dedicated CLS, dedicated maintenance analysts… As you mentioned, I guess I wasn’t growing the program across the company fast enough (I was pushing a rope with some groups) so the entire team was disbanded and returned to the general population. The plan being that the technicians would “transfer” their knowledge to the other crafts. To date, no new equipment has been purchased, very little training at one of the sites, so the program died. I tried for over 20 years to keep the program running, I felt like I was blowing up balloons…I’d get a program started at one facility, move on to another, and the air would be released from the other balloon. I’m sorry the company made the decisions they made, but it sure lowered my blood pressure!
By Gary Wiggins on October 22nd, 2009 at 11:27 am
I couldn’t have said it any better. I’m NOT God’s gift to maintenance by any strech of the imagination but you can chisel these words in stone… within 5 years of my leaving or sooner the program will die. It’s not like pushing a rope with the one’s “I” work for… It’s more like trying to water the garden with an eye dropper and the river is 22 miles away
By Brian Brannigan on October 24th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Even in Zimbabwe, that much maligned Industrial part of the world, I have seen it started, and supported by an enthusiastic workforce, when lead from the Man-in-the-Office. Good bonuses saw their efforts rewarded and, after Christmas, the Mill Engineer had been transferred (Company Pollicy. But on that one Mine, the Supervisor was an equal enthusiast and he “trained” the new Resident Engineer in the program.
Yes, this was a few years ago, and I retired this year, but the Team Principle holds true; Tier the reponsibility and “promotion from within” does not needfully kill a “Golden Goose”.