Conscious Asset

Today’s Gremlin – “The White Knight”, is a day-to-day hero, fixing what’s broken and returning the operation from panic. When things break, you really do need him, and he can be a hero, but couldn’t he be preventing those breakdowns?

The White Knight is the one you call when things have gone wrong. You need things fixed fast, regardless of the time of day, and he’s there for you. He works overtime if needed, he’s there when you need him, and he’s fast. Things do get fixed. But do they stay that way?

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Today’s Gremlin – “I’ve got this”, doesn’t cause trouble. In fact, he’s very motivated to keep things running smoothly. He’s good at what he does and he does keep things running. But, he’s a gremlin because he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Sometimes, he is closed to new ideas, thinking he has been there, done that and seen it all, but doesn’t realize that he really hasn’t. What he knows, he puts to good use. What he doesn’t know is where the limitation arises.

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Today’s Gremlin – “sweat the asset”, truly believes that running the plant and equipment as hard as possible is good for business. He couldn’t be more wrong!

This gremlin wants to produce more in a short time and runs the equipment at or even over its design capacity. In one plant in a big mine I met one of these – a production superintendent who believed he was doing his best when he ran the plant hard and just avoided tripping breakers! Running that hard  increases stress on the equipment, often ends up in overloading it, and causes it to fail prematurely.

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Today’s Gremlin – “follow me blindly”, is one of the big reasons your equipment isn’t reliable. Manufacturers tell you what maintenance to perform and how to do it, then insist you follow their guidance by voiding warranties if you don’t. Those recommendations are full of inspections and replacements if you find any flaw – even normal wear and tear! They ask you to overhaul equipment, replacing all sorts of parts that you must buy from them. If you are in the parts business, as your manufacturers are, you can make a real killing! So, if I’m a manufacturer of industrial equipment, you must follow me blindly.

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Today’s Gremlin – “lube it wrong”, is a leading cause of machinery breakdown. 60% to 80% of all bearing failures are due to lubrication related problems. Wrong lube, too much lube, too little lube, contaminated lube, degraded lube, overheated lube and even poor lube selection can all lead to premature failures of bearings. Put a tiny bit of dirt into a hydraulic system and watch it fail quickly.

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Today’s Gremlin – Don’t sweat the small stuff, gets us into trouble by skipping details and steps, that are important, often to save time. Don’t sweat the small stuff cuts a lot of corners, and makes a lot of mistakes through that carelessness. Often, he’s trying to save time, meet a deadline, or satisfy operators who urgently need their equipment back.

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Today’s Gremlin – Cheap Charlie, is a well intentioned but often mis-guided Gremlin. He or she can be many people and we’ve all dealt with them before. “Cheap Charlie” is someone who truly believes that not spending leads to profits. This is one of the many gremlins we talked about when we introduced this series of articles.

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Today’s Gremlin – It’ll never work here is the first one we’ll deal with. We’ve all run into him at one point or another. “It’ll never work here” is someone, or many, who has / have been around for a long time. This is one of the many gremlins we talked about when we introduced this series of articles.

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“Gremlins today” is a series of short articles on problems that plague industrial operations the world over.

Originally, Gremlins were fictitious mischievous trouble makers who caused Royal Air Force aircraft breakdowns during World War II. Author Roald Dahl published a book about them in 1943, based on his own experience as an RAF pilot. Pilots in the RAF used to carry lucky Gremlins to ward off their effects. Dahl worked with Disney to publish a cartoon book based on them, but it never made it into a movie at the time. Never-the-less, it did loosely inspire the 1984 movie, “Gremlins,” by Steven Spielberg.

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Are you having trouble producing good quality maintenance job plans?
Is your “standard job” plan library nearly empty?
Is your planned work running below 65% (bottom quartile)?
Note: scheduling without a plan, isn’t planned, and failing to plan is planning to fail!

With maintenance costs burning up to 30% or more of your operating costs (depending on industry) there can be a big benefit from reducing those costs. Every dollar saved goes straight to the bottom line, and upwards of 20% (sometimes more) can be achieved by doing a good job at maintenance work management. But many companies don’t even come close. At the heart of their problem is their approach to maintenance planning. Not the planners! They do their best but are often untrained and unfamiliar with good practice in planning. [Read more…]

The reality: Savings in work execution can easily be 30 to 60% of what you are spending today! That’s less labor, less overtime, less contracting, less consumption of parts and materials, less spend on delivery logistics, and less procurement activity. If your maintenance costs are in the range of 10 to 30% of your operating spend, you can save 3 to 18% of your operating labor costs by focusing on maintenance planning, scheduling and improving your proactive maintenance program.

The myth: many believe that planning and scheduling will solve their maintenance productivity problems, so they focus efforts to improve them. But despite their efforts, results don’t change. Time and again, we see reports showing relatively high levels of planned work but low schedule compliance, and production outputs don’t change. What’s going on?

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Here’s one you probably don’t expect from me. A children’s book! “Our World” is intended to spark curiosity In children about the world around them. It asks questions like, where does the water in my shower come from, how does the electricity in my light bulb get there, and many more. It uses everyday childhood experiences to spark questions.

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You probably have a computerized system for managing maintenance. It might be part of your integrated management software, like Oracle, or SAP. The business cases for initial purchase of these systems often include forecast cost savings of 20% or more. Most of the time, they fall far short of that. In fact, the costs of the new system, its implementation, the staff required to support and run it, the training needed for users, can easily grow bigger than the costs you had before the system was implemented.

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“Inspect and repair as required” are well intentioned but make up what is usually an ill-informed instruction to maintenance workers. On 10 April 2024, our Principal Consultant, James Reyes-Picknell, delivered a 1 hour “lunch and learn” webinar for PEMAC – Canada’s Asset Management Association. The subject is inspired by the words often seen in work orders that often lead to a whole lot of unnecessary misery. There’s a long introduction by PEMAC, which I strongly encourage my readers to join if you are not already a member. The content of the presentation begins at: 10:49.

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