Automated Bearing Wear Detection

Who is to blame when a defect occurs? Is it the supplier who was contracted to produce a key component or supply materials, or is it the customer organization that created the specs and produced the final product? As more companies outsource parts of production and develop closer partnerships with key suppliers, finding blame can topple the delicate balance in even the best customer-supplier relationship.

From my experience, it is more common than not to find that the working relationship between operations and maintenance is one of adversity instead of a relationship of close and productive cooperation. Operations often sees itself as the customer of maintenance, and, consequently, maintenance is viewed as a service provider. In such a relationship, it should be obvious that operations is responsible for the cost of the maintenance work it requests and gets delivered. However, in a bad relationship, this is not the case.

I've been fortunate in that I've been able to benchmark M&R improvement processes within and outside Cargill for the past decade. These visits have included trips all over the world. In a recent trip to one of our factories in Pennsylvania, I was introduced to a family of cultural change resistors that I'd like to share with you.

One of the major European postal services decided in the late 1990s to make a change in their plant maintenance organization. In my own U.S. Postal Service, there had been talk for years of combining the operations and maintenance supervision and reducing the supervisory ranks. It is easy to say, but how do you do it? Be careful of what you wish for!

Some of the common measures – besides outsourcing - taken when an organization decides they need to improve maintenance performance include moving all maintenance resources to area operations managers. I often get calls from organizations that are contemplating to take this step towards improvements. I always ask why they would do that, what are the perceived benefits?

Equipment inspections is key to keeping your production running but many plants don't tap into all the resources available. IDCON Reliability and Maintenance Management Consultant, Michael Lippig has a simple decision chart that will help you decide what tasks can be done by what roles.