Machinery Lubrication magazine published by Noria Corporation
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employees who work at facilities located throughout Ohio's Hamilton County. The MSD Wastewater Treatment Division operates and maintains seven major treatment plants and more than 100 smaller treatment facilities that process an average of 180 million gallons of raw sewage per day. Most of the major treatment facilities were built in the 1950s and contain more than 16,000 total discrete assets that are critical to meeting MSD's mission of protecting public health and the environment through water reclamation and watershed management. When the Wastewater Treatment Division decided to estab- lish an in-house PdM program, one of its strategic goals was to build internal PdM core competencies aligned with the mission and vision of the organization. This required alleviating prob- lems associated with data collection and correlation, communications (particularly feedback and follow-up on PdM-initiated work orders), and planning and scheduling. For several years, the organization had been using local maintenance personnel to perform ultrasonic analysis as well as online and offline motor testing to help complement its contractor-man- aged vibration and infrared (IR) thermography program. MSD's contractor had no access to its in-house technology or computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) databases due to strict firewall maintenance. This made correlating data very difficult or impossible for those outside the firewalls. All in-house technology databases were managed by MSD planners who issued work orders based on the results of the in-house testing but without much internal analyzing. The planners also wrote work orders from the quarterly PdM report provided by the contractor. Opportunities for data correlation were often overlooked or too difficult for those not trained or dedicated to doing so. The previous program operated under a basic plan. On a quarterly basis, the contractor performed vibration analysis and IR thermography on assets deemed critical to the wastewater treatment process. An asset list was sent out the week before the contractor's quarterly visits. The week of the visit, the contractor would collect data on all operating equipment during the first day or two. On the second or third day, the operations depart- ment was required to switch "missed" equipment so it would be running during the last days of the data-collection week. While this may seem to be an adequate plan, there were inherent flaws that took years to correct and required work- arounds to be devised. Not having in-house PdM technicians skilled in even basic vibration analysis and infrared thermog- raphy became problematic almost immediately after the start of the contractor-based PdM program. If critical equipment could not be switched by operations (for any number of reasons), that piece of equipment was missed until the next quarterly contractor visit (or longer). Delays in post-maintenance testing (PMT) were another issue. When the contractor identified a problem, the in-house maintenance crew would make the repair but had no way to tell www.machinerylubrication.com | March - April 2013 33