Is Your Maintenance Program Proactive?

By BRETT WINBERG

Back in August of 2001 we had written a LubeTalk letter about why a Proactive approach to oil analysis was so important. With help from my mentor, Jim Fitch, we wanted to bring back an old LubeTalk that got a lot of attention. Thanks to all of our subscribers for their valued input.

Today we are going to take a short look at why running a condition based monitoring maintenance program will save your company thousands of dollars. You must first use a lab that will help you understand “Condition Based Monitoring” and also ensure that your company and technicians implement the same program.

Many companies that use an oil analysis program are unsure what the oil sample report is really tellingl them. Is it telling us when to change oil? Is it telling us when a part on a machine will fail? Is it used to determine how or why a machine will fail? These are all great questions and they are all actually true of oil sampling.

When going to a “Condition Based Monitoring Program”, you are heading the right direction to becoming a “Proactive Maintenance Company”. When your company becomes Proactive, you will begin to save money in many different areas of your maintenance program. Labor, disposal, consumption, downtime, failure, and many others that saves thousands of dollars each year.

Whenever a “Proactive Maintenance” program is applied, there are usually some steps that are necessary to insure that all the benefits are being achieved. Proactive means that there will be continuous activity of monitoring and controlling the machine’s failure by root cause. So the first step would be to set a 'target limit' or a 'standard' associated with each root cause. These target limits help insure that prolonged lubricants may be ran in each machine being monitored.

With oil analysis, root causes relates to fluid contamination (moisture, heat, particles, glycol, and depletion of the additives) of the lubricant being monitored. But the process of defining these targets are very challenging, to determine when oil is at its limit. Finding out how the lubricant becomes contaminated is also a step, and to eliminate the entry point is a big factor when going to condition based monitoring. Usually, better filtration and the use of separators are a required step as well. But choose your products carefully, there are many products that say they work, but cannot back up their data.

A major step when going to proactive methods is making sure that the oil samples are taken properly. Cleanliness is a big factor when getting the right information on each machine or piece of equipment. Always use a clean bottle, new tube and clean your vampire pump every time for a pure and clean oil sample.

You must become very disciplined of monitoring and controlling fluid cleanliness and keeping to your target limits. These limits are set for you and your company to feel comfortable about becoming a “Proactive Company”. So work with your lab to help set your companies limits to achieve your goals and objectives.

And finally when your company becomes “Proactive”, early warning benefits help determine when your predictive maintenance program comes into effect. The proactive maintenance stresses root cause; predictive maintenance targets the detection of failure of both fluids and machine components like bearings, gears and cylinders. This usually is determined by the presence of metallic wear debris in the oil.

Abnormal levels of these types of metallic debris are a signal that the machine’s internal surfaces are being distressed and possibly causing a downtime problem. This way, immediate corrective action can be taken to effectively avoid failure chain reactions and further machine destruction.

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