What makes the difference between success and failure in meeting maintenance task deadlines? How can equipment reliability and maintenance task completion times be improved? These and other maintenance related questions can be answered by the UCC International’s Skills Assessment and Multi-skilling approach to maintenance training. Certified Trades and Technical staff at the University College of the Cariboo have developed a process by which maintenance supervisors and decision makers can adequately address maintenance skills weaknesses within their organization.

“At the end of every batch, my pump wants to go home!” These were the words said to me in halting English by a maintenance manager of a major brewery in Manilla during one of my trips to the beautiful Philippines. Although I was accompanied by a translator, the manager insisted on trying out his limited English. As we were obviously having some kind of communication breakdown, I asked the translator to verify the comment. Sure enough, back it came, accompanied by a big grin and lots of head nodding. “At the end of every batch, my pump wants to go home.” Obviously, this was a pump I just had to see!

In 1999-2001, the New Jersey International & Bulk Mail Center (NJI&BMC) in Jersey City, one of the largest United States Postal Service facilities, was concerned about its eight 33-year-old motor control centers (MCCs). Events forced a decision to pursue options for replacing or refurbishing the 276 cells that provide power primarily to 58 heating, air conditioning, and ventilation air handling units (HVAC AHUs) for the 1.8-million-sq-ft facility.

Effective pump maintenance allows industrial plants to keep pumps operating well, to detect problems in time to schedule repairs, and to avoid early pump failures. Regular maintenance also reveals deteriorations in efficiency and capacity, which can occur long before a pump fails. Wear ring and rotor erosions, for example, can be costly problems that reduce wire-to-water efficiency by 10% or more. The amount of attention given to maintenance depends on how important a system is to a plant’s operations.

he application of motor systems maintenance and management programs have the potential impact of saving industry an initial $26.5 Billion in electrical energy costs while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by over 3,000 Mega-Tons per year.  The individual impact on production availability is also significant, by reducing troubleshooting and evaluation time by over 50%, motor repair by over 30% and general motor-system related labor by up to 50%, following the application and sustainment of the program.  In this article, we are going to cover three opportunities obtained through the application of the Electrical Motor Diagnostic component of an overall program.

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a maintenance program which involves a newly defined concept for maintaining plants and equipment. This paper will define TPM history, benefits, strengths as a maintenance philosophy, its implementation approach, difficulties in its implementation and cost of implementing TPM. TPM is to Maintenance as Total Quality is to Production The goal of the TPM program is to markedly increase production while, at the same time, increasing employee morale and job satisfaction.