I was until recently a contractor/consultant handling VA, Thermography and adminstering lube sample analysis programmes, both routine and troubleshooting work, plus some TEV and ultrasonics to a lesser degree. I've left that field now but still have an interest, and I've been thinking recently,

Should the maintenance department really be handlign all this predictive work?

May sound stupid at first, (please feel free to tell me so, I have a thick skin) but, VA, thermography, oil etc. gives us a accurate idea which machines are going to require maintenance, what type of breakdown is to be avoided and which one's are relitively closer to breakdown than others.

The production shedules however are understood and operated in the produciton sphere, so the operators and their managers better understand the impact on the business of each machine breaking down.

So should I have been submitting my reports to the production managers so they can determine the real nose bleeders, which when we consider that a couple of days total plant outage due to a failure of a £100 gearbox that is not in the stores could easily outstip the cost to replace a £100,000 gearbox that can be worked around.

I suppose that this could be considered a first step in a move away from adversarial production and maintenance systems to proper asset management.

Anybody want to suggest a name for predictive once taken out of the maintennace sphere?

Proactive Produciton Protection?? (too much of a mouthful I think)

What would do a Production Manager with the reports? Slap the face of the Maintenance Manager with them and tell (yell) him/her: See, your people are not doing a good job with my equipment! ???

Are Production Managers prepared to understand, analyze and make sound descisions after reading VA results? They not even knew their equipment have bearings!

Even the minority who asked what was the reason for last breakdown, and learned that the problem was related to the bearings can not tell the difference between a bearing and a damper.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Eugene,

Great topic! I hope this post gets some legs. What if a company had a Chief of Business Reliabilty that was in charge of all reliabilty issues, whether they related to physical assets, human assets or intangible assets (i.e. customer satisfaction). The predictive maintenance group would report to the manager handling asset reliability.

I agree it will depend on the structure that the plant / company has. When I was hired in my current company the "Engineering Manager" was in charge of:
* Engineering: Design/Drafting, Project Engineering / Management
* Maintenance (including planning, stockroom, calibration, mechanical, electrical, and facilities)
* Utilities: Electrical Power, Water Systems, Steam, Nitrogen, Waste Management
* Telephone/Page systems administration
*** They where several Engineers and Supervisors reporting to the Eng. Mgr. handling the specific areas. The Mechanics supervisor also supervised the utilities area).
Later structure move up to have an independent Utilities Supervisor reporting to Operations and transfered the telephone/page systems to IS/IT.
Later Maintenance Engineering grew up to department level with a Maintenance Manager and Maintenance Engineers/Maintenance Supervisors reporting to him.

I would leave Predictive to technical know-how departments such as Maintenance or Engineerng (depending of structure) but never to the Production or "Equipment Owner" Manager.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Eugene,

Why Production? Because they receive the Production schedule from the Production Planning section and they run/operate it? They understand the impact of the business interruptions if equipment went down?

If that's the case why not transferring the PM responsibility as well? Didn't a lack of PM have the same effect: equipment failure, downtime?

Change reporting lines and promote the Production Manager to Maintenance Manager's boss?
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I think the key is the Maintenance Planners communication with Production Planning / Production Supervisors.

The equipment owner would look at the cost, look at the profit and start cutting in guess what?

Definitely not in the raw materials.

A friend of mine who worked at a "chicken farm" complained that if one chicken had the flu, they would bring it to the intensive care with an ambulance. For the boiler, needed to process the poultry, the owner suggested to buy a valve at the local supermarket.

Eugene,

In reply to your points, I don't envisge the production manager being interested in the modes of failure, he merely looks at the list of machines in trouble, think's 'oh blimy, if the chicken boiler breaks down then we're in the do-do' and passes this info to the maintenance department for what ever corrective action they deem necessary, he wouldn't actually direct the repairs process.

Also, PM's are primarily done for legislative or other time focussed reasons, at the end of the day it's only running a calender. Any department could do this and then it's upto the production/maint teams to decide on the risk balance of putting PM's off, as I'm sure a lot of companies do now.

I would agree that the current arrangements are very much dependent on communications between planners and production, and it also sounds like a few of our pals here are still having problems with other departments not valuing the importance of good maintenance.

tthew

quote:

Anybody want to suggest a name for predictive once taken out of the maintenace sphere?

Eugene

quote:

I would leave Predictive to technical know-how departments such as Maintenance or Engineerng (depending of structure) but never to the Production or "Equipment Owner" Manager.

I go with Eugene

As a consultant you would be reporting to a guy that is your liasons-officer, don't bother the CEO, Director, Production Manager, Asset Manager if he is not personally involved. It is the duty of your liasions-officer to get the message to the right places.
If he can't, then there aro two reasons:
1) Your reporting style is not adequate for the organization (too technical, too vague, too crowded, too much math)
2) The organization is too (excuse me the expression) dumb. Ignorance can be resolved with training, but if training is seen like an expense...

A lot of guys who are in the vibrating/thermo consulting nowadays were once employed by the same companies that once had their own inhouse PdM department. Since we went to lean manufacturing, down-seizing, cost cutting, globalization, ISO certification etc.. The buzz word was outsourcing. The "beanies" calculated that it would be cheaper.

So if the message don't get across, the only thing I could advice:
Educate your liasons-officer(s). He will be getting the heat from managent.
And if this officer is someone on the bottom of the food chain, well that demonstrates clearly what is the opinion of Management about maintenance.

quote:

Also, PM's are primarily done for legislative or other time focussed reasons, at the end of the day it's only running a calender. Any department could do this

I also have a very thick skin,

But these are exactly the thoughts that wander in the upper clouds, no wonder that there is a shortage of skilled workers.

quote:

But these are exactly the thoughts that wander in the upper clouds, no wonder that there is a shortage of skilled workers.

Yeah, sorry about that. In my clumsy attempt to start some serious discussion, I just made myself sound like a pillock.

You will get over it

At least you got the guts to start a discussion, a lot are only spectators.
With upper clouds in general I mean the top that doesn't have a clue what is going on.

Don't let this discussion stop you from participating.

quote:

Don't let this discussion stop you from participating.

No I certainly won't, and I only really meant I was wrong about my last comment, the diary one. I still think that an intelligent production department that recognises the importance of quality maintenance management could well provide direction to the maintenace teams in terms of the order of work identified by PDM routines and reports.

I think that I have had some different experiences from some others in that,

1, production departments in the companies I worked, (and now work) for are more appreciative of the maintenance department role, and flexible when it comes to balancing production shedules vs. maintenance shedules.

2, maintenance departments are still concentrating on maintaining by machine, rather than the function of the machine/system.

which is how my views have developed, perhaps this comes down to the fact that I tend to have been working for smaller companies or individual sites within larger corperations.

This has been a really good discussion.

Here is my two cents worth - ultimatley it is all about the philosphy and understanding of the decision makers - at all levels. Maintenance is no different to safety or quality or customer service or any other business issue. Someone who contols the money will have a view and that view will direct the policy of the organization.

I have worked for both large and small and public and private companies and seen the different views taken with changes in ownership or CEO. One wants cash another profit, one wants relaibility another wants to cut costs.

In my opinion, the only way to work through this is to fight fire with fire. By that I mean maintenance people need to learn the language and motivation of the business managers and then influence them in terms and arguements that they understand. It would be rare for a maintenace person to take advice from an accountant if they didn't trust them so why would we expect the opposite?

What do you think?

quote:

Originally posted by Phillip Slater:
In my opinion, the only way to work through this is to fight fire with fire. By that I mean maintenance people need to learn the language and motivation of the business managers and then influence them in terms and arguements that they understand.

I agree, use their language, translate to their terms what you want. I even learn that to grasp certain Operations Director attention and blessing to a proposal the presentation backgorund color should be blue (his favorite color) but never red.

quote:

Originally posted by tthew:
... I don't envisge the production manager being interested in the modes of failure, he merely looks at the list of machines in trouble, think's 'oh blimy, if the chicken boiler breaks down then we're in the do-do' and passes this info to the maintenance department for what ever corrective action they deem necessary, he wouldn't actually direct the repairs process...

Other point against of Predictive running by Production, if the role of the Production Manager would be pass the information to Maintenance, why add this no-value-added step that slow down the process? How many days the report will sit at the Production Manager desk before he/she reads it and says: Oh I better call the Maintenance Manager and talk about this.

He will read it when the plant breaks down, to cover his...

Ultimately, all of this discussion is about culture. It doesn'treally matter which department manages the activity as long as they employ the right expertise and take 'appropriate' action. The key word being appropriate.

What I think is appropriate and what someone else thinks may be different. Culture really defines this. For example, if the company has a reliability culture then they will take one type of action, if they have a cost culture they will take a different approach.

I started fighting the good fight for 'maintenance as management' (as oposed to maintenance as craft) in the 1980's. At that time our CEO was an engineer and we could win arguements at that level - even though the rest of the leadership group didn't support the idea. Interestingly the greatest resistance came from the maintenance team that feared a loss of control (a whole other story). But in any case the issue was culture - short term cost management versus long term cost management.

A few years later we had a change of CEO to an accountant. After a plant upgrade he wanted to cut our budgets on the basis that we had new machines needing less maintenance. We succesfully argued that the greater level of sophistication of the new equipment meant that we needed more funding not less. We won that arguement because we had successfully changed the culture in the rest of the senior leadership group! They had experienced the success of our other work.

The moral of the story? Speak their language, be an influencer and demonstrate results. If you need to start small. Start an unauthorized pilot of some kind. Gather evidence and then present that in a way that the decision maker can understand.

Most engineers don't grasp this. Maybe because you can't work it out with a slide rule. Maybe because we all think that what is obvious to us is obvious to everyone else. But those that do get it make a real difference to their companies.

(You can see that this really gets me going!)

I agree with Phil: "Speak the language of those who control the purse strings" is a must if you believe in the value of your contribution to your business.

I have seen all types of PdM team arrangements, and believe that a specialist central team is the best way. The people will grow in stature as they share their experiences directly, cover each other for leave, training and overtime, etc. Led by the right person, they can build up credibility with opeations staff and those who do the actual trades work.

If tradespeople are rotated through the team for 6 months or a year, then team credibility will be helped further. Successes should be quietly publicised, acknoledging all involved.

All of this will I believe get ops and maint people to tell CM people of their observations nmaybe even before anything is noticed by routine data gathering.

I took much time in explaining to tradespeople what I was doing when balancing a mill/fan, or just taking vibration data. I know that they appreciated it- maybe some of that was that not all engineers did take that time.

Ray

Production/Operations commitments will always take precedence when the expressed needs of the PDM/Maintenance program conflict.
The translation of technical information into language the production/operations management understands is unnecessary if you are making sound judgements in regard to what should be done and when.

The trust mentioned earlier will come after production/operations sees the impact of ignoring the messenger, regardless of where he/she sits in the organization. Efforts are better spent making sure the technology keeps you informed.

My two cents.

How about PdM or predictive maintenance; seems to fit somehow.

Send the report to the production manager, production engineer, maintenance manager, maint engr, the one over both those departments and the CEO. Then the empire builders are operating outside of their private fenced-in areas and have to answer to the CEO ultimately. But you won't win friends in all probility.

Seems to me that each area wants things in their hand and filter out information as they deem fit or to make themselves look good. This approach leaves the gate open for all the bones to walk out of the closet and been seen by the guy in the shiny suit.