Maintenance 101

Here are some interesting thoughts about how to get your maintenance program to work better.
1) Preventative maintenance-if you wait for something to break you can expect longer downtimes, more expensive repairs and you can't maintain your equipment because you are too busy fixing your equipment.
2) Staffing-when it is time to cut, do you accept cuts in planners, schedulers or maintenance clerks as something you MUST do or do you fight for those people with reliability records and consequences for not doing it.
3) Planning-if you expect your equipment to run properly and continuously you have to plan for maintenance downtime so you can fix something before it breaks and when it is schedukled to be down.
4) Measure your success-"if you don't know where you are going any road will take you there" Whatever you want, equipment operating hours between breakdowns, total hours operating per time period, quarterly "up" time. Measure it.
5) Train your people- Does everyone know how to change that bearing on #2 feedwater pump? cross train and develop an apprenticeship program if you need to. Trained employees can be paid more because they are worth more. What happens when the 60 something mechanic retires and no-one knows what he knows?
6) Teamwork-encourage teamwork both for cross training and to develop crossover skills. A little rivalry can help everyone do the job better. Day shift, night shift, journeyman, apprentice, blue collar, white collar, if everone is hooked to the wagon you can onlu pull it one way.
7) Accountability- try to determine reasons for failure so you can learn for the next time. Was the bearing screaming and no one heard it? By determining root cause you find the process that failed and FIX it. Be it human or process it is about PROGRESS.

Nuclear Power and Energy

As we watch the Japanese try to control their damaged reactors we hear lots of noise about doing without nuclear power. "We need clean energy" they cry!. However, I have not seen any alternatives that are even close to supplying the amount of power that nuclear power provides today much less in the future. In the US, nuclear power plants supply about 20% of the total energy. In the world it is only 6%. In the world the projected energy consumption will go from approximately 500 Quadrillion BTU to 722 Quadrillion BTU by 2030. We won't get there with wind and we won't get there without nuclear. All things considered we have to use everything we have and continuously improve what we do to get there. Better efficiency, new fuels, more of what we've got and an understanding that to continue to live the lifestyle we have we must continue to use coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, wind and solar and continue to look for more and better. There is no alternative. What are we going to give up? Our air conditioning? Our refrigerators? Our computers, cell phones, i-pods, car chargers, lights, TVs and cable boxes? Our manufacturing capabilty, transportation and commercial? Our population continues to grow. World population continues to grow and as the third world counties become more like us with modern conveniences their energy use will grow exponentially. To those bleeding hearts who think we can do without certain energy sources I would say "get off the grid"

Planned vs Unplanned Maintenance

In many of our industries, in an effort to continue production and "equipment available" time we develop maintenance schedules for all running equipment. Can we anticipate all breakdowns, probably not. However, we can predict many of them and since unplanned maintenance can cost up to 15 times as much as planned maintenance we need to look at it. What does downtime cost? A coal prep plant I work with costs $52,000/hour. A longwall mining machine can be $600/second to $12,000/hour. A chemical plant as much as $150,000/hour. Continually looking at maintenance schedules with the idea of planning as much as possible and anticipating as much as possible is money well spent. Achieving high productivity numbers is the direct result of planned and predictive maintenance programs designed to keep as much equipment as possible running and elimionate unscheduled down time.

Cutting Maintenance: You Can't Afford It

If your cost cutting in the last two years have focused on maintenance then you have slashed budgets, defer projects and hold back spending. If what you are cutting is waste then great BUT cutting maintenance could be dangerous. When cutting we tend to cut activities not waste. We do fewer PMs, we delay replacing parts we know are worn and we cut back hours and personel. All to cut expenses. However, maintenance is not strictly an expense, it is a contributor to capacity, through put, safety, environmental integrity, quality and scheduling agility, all things a manufacturing facility needs more of not less. Treating maintenance like office supplies is wrong-headed and dangerous. Planning your maintenance with productivity in mind and reducing downtime will do more to enhance the bottom line than cutting a maintenance expense.

Left Right Politics

I am amazed today by the extremes on both sides of the political debate. Rants by the liberals on the left about shipping jobs overseas, busting unions, the rich getting richer and trying to eliminate the middle class, tax breaks for the rich, America doesn't produce anything anymore and on and on. Rants by the right that unions are bankrupting the country, (FYI unions represent only 11.9% of the workforce in 2010. 36.2 % of the public sector and 6.9% of the private sector.) that we are spiraling out of control, that our debt is unmanageable etc etc.
Granted, unemployment is too high, our debt is too high, our deficit is too high and much of the debt and deficit problem is unsustainable. We need to make changes. We spend too much. BUT, the demise of the US of A is greatly exaggerated.
The real truth is in the middle. There are 90% of the population working (for brevity I rounded the unemployment to 10%) That means there are lots of people making things, doing things, paying their mortgage, buying things and YES starting businesses. That is where the employment will come from not from the big businesses. There are fewer auto workers at the big three than before the bailout. Private businesses will be the answer to growing our way out of this mess. They will hire people, their payrolls will multiply in the economy and tax revenues will increase. Taxing the rich only encourages them to move assets to tax shelters. When John D Rockefeller died his family had more money in tax shelters than their Standard Oil stock was worth primarily because of high taxes. Taxes on the rich become "voluntary" taxes because they have the resources to move assets to shelters to offset the tax.
We live in a 14.6 Trillion Dollar economy, the largest in the world by a factor of 3 unless you count the European Union which approximates our economy if you lump all 27 countries together. We continue to be the largest manufacturer in the world, students from every country come here to be educated. Immigrants from every nation want to come here because of the opportunity, the freedoms both personal and market and our type of government.
As Mark Twain said " The report of my death has been greatly exaggerated."