Exercising 20 minutes every morning is better than a heart-transplant. Won’t the same common sense apply to your maintenance and reliability?
Have you thought about it?
It seems intriguing and yet so true.
As engineers lost in the iron-clad world of engines, assembly lines, tool-boxes, turbines and metal all around; it’s easy to forget what machines are all about.
It’s easy to forget that just because they are machines, they can not be treated with some attributes a human is naturally eligible for – care, attention and rest.
While the human resources in your factory get the above entities as fair rights and can even rouse a commotion if neglected for long; machines can not make noise about their rights.
Nevertheless, they too need some attention, care and break-time. They might not have a Union to represent their case but beware of the noise they might make, at the wrong time and at very wrong decibels.
Ask yourself some brutal and candid questions – Do you treat maintenance as a necessary evil? Just as a formality? Often neglect it? Even when done, it’s only with a ‘we will fix it when it breaks’ approach?
How many of us would laugh at a word like ‘Planned Downtime’?
How many of us scoff a term called ‘Preventive Maintenance’?
How many of us would shrug shoulders when asked about the number of hours devoted to regular upkeep of machines?
Now answer this one.
How many of us would mock a doctor if s/he suggests you to exercise, take preventive medicine or vaccination to stay away from heart attacks?
The ‘you must be kidding’ guffaw suddenly vanishes.
Answers vary, right?
Take a moment here before it’s too late to amend.
A machine may not have a heart but the rules of preventive healthcare apply to it in almost an equal degree.
Preventive maintenance is not an alien term these days. Not at least in world-class companies or in international counter parts. Sadly, the state of affairs is very acutely dismal in India.
Just like a medical emergency can be avoided by regular and preventive healthcare, so can plant emergencies be avoided, if care of machines entails preventive maintenance, instead of reactive maintenance.
For the uninitiated, preventive genre of maintenance is something that is done via planned downtime and predictive shutdowns.
Critics and naysayers apropos this concept may argue that it’s all a Phirang concept and very very copybook style, hence not being practical at all.
Reasons you avoid it
Some arguments are reasonable. Yes, an engineer’s plate is always full of hectic schedules, tight deadlines, production targets etc. If one has to be competitive and be on the top, one can’t afford to waste time on planned outages and other stuff. So many big deals and orders would than just pass us by like a ship in the night, is a plausible question.
But ponder again, with that kind of an attitude, would the same company be able to hold the appellation of being ‘big’ or ‘major’ as one may proudly refer to it. It’s not a world class company if it treats maintenance like a step-child, right?
Any international-level comparison is proof enough that great companies treat preventive-reactive maintenance in an 85 per cent: 5 per cent split. It’s weird that top management of companies in India is so negligent. So it’s not all theory and idealistic. In fact, preventive approach is more pragmatic than quixotic.
Consider the healthcare analogy here.
People are ready to take the risk of a long sick leave, lifelong maladies, costly surgeries, obnoxious chemical doses and treatments, and utter physical discomfort but they would always shrug off one day of annual medical check-up or 15 minutes of daily exercise. Who has got the time, is the rhetoric one often hears.
But isn’t vaccination always a better option? If you spare one day or small breaks to save you a big stretch of unproductive and distressing treatment time, what’s the harm? Specially because in some cases, it can save lives.
Machines or humans; both depreciate with time, both can breakdown, but if you keep taking the breaks for fitness and health, the longevity is visible. So is productivity.
There are always some hours one can take out from an evening or night time window. One can plan your inventory in advance so that planned downtime does not interrupt production targets. Even if it is mission-critical equipment, let’s say in a turbine or a nuclear reactor, one can always use redundancies and back-up.
Whether it’s the heart or a big machine, the arteries need to be lubricated timely, else they fail, and in most cases without any warning. A heart attack always hurts.
Side-effects
The truth is harsh and there is a much bigger picture to preventive maintenance than mere productivity improvement, or averting last-minute breakdowns.
Engineers or technically inclined professionals are cogent, intelligent and in a better position to make a difference to this world, and yet they don’t use these powers. They say the opposite of love is not hatred but indifference. Isn’t it anything but indifference that ultimately leads to grave tragedies like BP oil leak or Bhopal gas incident? Think about the safety hazards, the environmental repercussions and over-energy-usage that are a direct backwash of maintenance-neglect.
Look closer, and we will discover the crevices where we let it slip away.
One major gap is the way we document and manage production-records. There’s a conspicuous lack of proper systems or automation on that area, which deters preventive maintenance. And that coupled with management’s attitude is also the reason why even well-chalked out AMCs (Annual Maintenance Contracts) are not administered properly.
The long-term repercussions of these gaps can be quite huge.
When, a machine breaks down abruptly, it’s hard to fix it on the go. The spare parts are not always available. It takes some time to retune something when it goes out of kilter.
Then there are other implications. Those hours of reactive repair translate into time-creeps, schedules going awry, quality getting affected, supply chain getting hammered and of course the eventual impact on top line, bottom line, lost man hours, and sometimes serious safety issues. It’s funny how we forget that small mosquitoes can upset even an elephant.
And yet, we still ignore the obvious woodcutter’s rule of sharpening one’s axe.
Your machine is your axe. It helps you to cut through all those targets, ambitious projects and business momentum with efficiency. That’s exactly why it’s wiser to sharpen it once in a while.
After all there’s still that time-tested adage – A break is always better than a breakdown.
