Maintworld 2/2020

PARTNER ARTICLE
or materials needed for the work they
need to plan. That means they are wasting
time searching for or even buying
parts. And don’t get me started on the
fact that most of the work requests are
given a much higher priority than they
should be because they aren’t truly important
but emotional.”
I’ve heard discussions like these many
times over the years, only the names of
the technologies are different.
I am all for new technology. In the late
1970s I introduced and taught technologies
such as SPM and Acoustic Emission,
Wear Particle Analyses with Ferrography,
Thermovision and many more, in
Europe, China, India and many other
countries. I was also instrumental in
developing the first Computerized Maintenance
Management System in 1968. A
much-updated version that is still on the
market, The Idhammar System.
Today, new technologies are being
introduced and adopted rapidly such as
Internet of Things (IOT), cloud-based
applications, better sensors and capabilities
to accumulate huge amount of data.
This is good and I am certainly all for it
– when it is applied at the right time for
the organization. I like this quote from
Bill Gates:
“The first rule of technology used
in a business is that automation [new
technology] applied to an efficient operation
will magnify the efficiency.
The second is that automation
[new technology] applied to an inefficient
operation will magnify the inefficiency”
– Bill Gates
I fully agree with this statement
because I have seen so many examples
where this is true. I visited a plant
that had installed on-line condition
monitoring systems that overwhelmed
the Reliability Engineers and others
with alarms on possible early failures.
They were overwhelmed because
their very basic reliability and maintenance
management processes were
not well-developed and at best only
partially executed. Backlogs were increasing
and failure reports from their
Vibration and Oil Analyses were not
be acted upon.
This new technology for the plant
would have been good if they had been
in a position to Plan then Schedule the
correction of these failures before they
develop into a breakdown.
Even though I have been preaching
this for 50 years, I cannot stress
enough how important it is, when implementing
new technologies, that the
very basics of maintenance prevention,
inspections, plan, schedule and
execute must be working well.
This includes that most reliability
related maintenance work is generated
as a result of condition monitoring
and basic inspections, right priorities
in notifications and work requests,
less than 10% changes in daily schedules
that were frozen 20 hours in advance
of execution, etc.
Most of us who have been in this
business a long time knows this. But
the next generation will learn a lot of
new technology at colleges and conferences,
which is important, necessary
and very good. However, they will also
have to understand that people and
good execution of the basic RM processes
is still necessary for successful
implementation of new technologies.
John, the Reliability Engineer in this
article, should focus on implementing
the basics to be ready for financially
viable use of upgraded technologies.
When maintenance prevention including
lubrication, justified fixed time
maintenance, precision alignment,
balancing and Root Cause Problem
Elimination (RCPE), etc. are executed
at a good level, and the chain (Inspect,
Plan, Schedule, Execute), is not broken,
you will enable great results using the
technology you are ready for.
You might think this is antiquated
and that there must be a better way to
manage maintenance. You are right, the
same processes have been around for
almost 2000 years, perhaps longer than
that. The only thing that has changed,
and will continue to change is technology,
which in the last 60 years has
become much better and much more
affordable.
The first known book on Maintenance
Management that I have found
is De Aquaeductu Urbis Romae written
by Sextius Julius Frontinus AD 97.
NEW TECHNOLOGIES ARE IMPORTANT BUT USE ONLY THE
TECHNOLOGIES YOUR ORGANIZATION IS READY FOR.
He was appointed by the emperor of
Rome to maintain the aqueducts. Rome
had a shortage of water and the alternative
was to build a new aqueduct.
Instead Sextius Julius improved maintenance
of the aqueducts. The results
included surplus of water in Rome
without building a new aqueduct.
What he did can be summarized like
this:
• Site visits
• Documentation
• Inspections
• Daily meetings
• Work preparation (Planning)
• Preventive Maintenance
We can call maintenance management
by many new acronyms, but the
basics are the same.
I like to end with something I have
said many times over the years:
“New Technologies are important but
use only the Technologies your organization
is ready for”.
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