Archive for June, 2008

Unraveled Reliability

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Humans are creatures of habit. They perform along certain established “known” lines of action, and reject the unknown quantities as potential failures or as unnecessary supplementary effort quite likely to yield identical (and sometimes worse) results. Due consideration for said results may at times ignore the fact that the additional benefits are seen elsewhere by people with a different skillset (for instance, the habit of entering ALL pertinent data in a CMMS merely seems overly long and tedious, whereas the manager wishes to mine the data to yield significant indicators that may or may not be understood at the keyboard entry level).

Changing any one “train of thought” is possible, but even that requires patience and dexterity in managing the change and shifting attitudes towards new goals. Attempting to change several known parameters towards newfangled ways of doing things can thus be readily demonstrated as both dangerous and most likely ineffective in the long run. A change can be achieved in the short run whilst a constant push is maintained to hold up the massive “old ways” but the second we remove the sustaining presence of that force, the old ways will seek to return back into familiar patterns.

How does this affect reliability efforts? Another author (and I seemingly can not readily find the reference at present) calls it the “6 months rule”. People will (albeit often grudgingly) go along with new methods for a period of six months and then, if no obvious results or benefits can be identified from their point of view, these same people will stop believing (if they ever did) that potential rewards will soon appear.

Six months is an exceedingly short time when projects are handled in parallel to regular tasks. The vaunted “trial period” may be shorter than many implementations when execution is handled internally, and contracting out requires adequate budgets and an ever expanding relationship with the contractor to achieve the desired ends within a short time period.

Bottom line: if implementation must succeed, sustained efforts (and money) must be provided to deliver quickly!~

© 2008 by François Gagnon

 

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Capital Investment Versus Maintenance Cost

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

We can likely never reach a conclusion befitting the complexity of the following question: should we buy new equipment, replacing the “old”, or should we repair what is currently installed and already paid?

Problems from an operating cost quickly arise when from a matter of policy, no “new” expenditure can take place to pay for asset replacement: maintenance falls into a rut, incapable of effectively managing reliability, and the plant becomes overly expensive for such simple matters as aging (and obsolete or “too often repaired”) assets.

The case of the electric motor comes to mind. How often should a motor be repaired or rewound, excluding purely mechanical components such as a bearing replacement? Three repair cycles is generally recognized as the upper limit (some may disagree). What is the principal cost tied to the electric motor? Its purchase price? In fact, the cost of power consumption (and waste if inefficiencies accumulate) far exceeds the purchase price, or the difference in price between a high-efficiency electric motor and a relatively inefficient one.

Failure to evaluate (or reassess in cases where the original evaluation was made years in the past) the true costs of operation tied to electric motors lead to unreliable operation and stupendously superior energy expenditures. The breakpoint of “buy new” versus “operate the inefficient” is reached much sooner than most people intuitively assess. Therefore, the payback period of such a project as buying a new motor must be set at a time-period enabling plant cost viability. Is 3 months too long a payback? Is the plant not going to stay in operation for years to come? Worse is the cumulative effect of spreading the “disease” to a large population of motors and eventually facing huge cost overruns that can then only be addressed by massive injections of capital instead of dealing with this issue progressively and constantly during the plant’s life.

“In this business climate, we know not how long we will continue production!” seems to be a common concern, but since usable assets would likely be shipped to a more viable site, the expense still holds as a reasonable approach.

© 2008 by François Gagnon

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