Machinery Lubrication magazine published by Noria Corporation
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1171112
AS I SEE IT 4 | September - October 2019 | www . machinerylubrication.com asks you where it hurts, you must not hold anything back. is is equally true for assessments. Noria has learned much in more than 20 years of performing assess- ments. e results that are reported are almost always a surprise to management and other stakeholders. Of course, no one likes being told their baby is ugly, but without the knowl- edge and then acceptance of what's wrong, no benefi cial progress can be made. Pain can be a great source of fuel to drive your transformation. Most assessments produce an overall score scaled 0 to 100. Low scores should not make you feel depressed or angry but rather just the opposite. View this score as a low-hanging fruit meter. e lower the number, the more accessible and delicious the fruit. High scores require more work and the need to reach further into the tree or to start climbing. Now, why is it that low-hanging fruit is usually invisible to those who work closest to it? Often it is willful blindness or simply being unable to see what's on the tip of your nose. is also is known as unconscious selective attention. Your nose is always in view of your eyes, but yet your brain does not register its presence. Likewise, you are exposed to many things in a plant environ- ment that you seemingly do not see. ese are things that your brain has cancelled out. ere is willful blindness, too (not wanting to see or remedy). Basically, you tell lies to yourself about what you don't want to know or believe to exist. Eventually, this puts you in a state of oblivion and unconscious incompetency. is is like kaizen in reverse. A professional assessor or auditor is not burdened by such mental fi lters or blindness. He or she is trained to see it all and report what is seen. At its best, assessing is investigative, penetrating and purposeful. It's an assessment of the good, the bad and the ugly. It seeks opportunities for change and improvement. ADDS Seeks the Controllable and the Exploitable An assessor should search for meaningful and exploitable gaps between the current state and the optimum reference state (ORS). e ORS is similar to best practice but with a strong emphasis on the "opti- mized" state, which can vary between applications and the necessity of being measurable and/or verifi able. Refer to previous Machinery Lubri- cation articles for a more detailed explanation of the ORS. When attained, an optimized state of reliability is achieved by prac- tical choices that balance resource constraints, application conditions and potential benefi ts against the idea l. Depending on machine criticality and the potential cost of failure, you want to identify the opti- mized spend for reliability. You don't want excessive, wasteful spending. At the same time, you don't want to starve your machines or program of needed reliability resources. e ORS seeks precision. For instance, which machines require 3-micron f iltration, and which do not? Which machines call for premium synthetic lubricants, and which do not? Which machines need online and real-time condition monitoring, and which do not? While an ADDS assessor searches for low-hanging fruit, several things must be kept in mind. ese include the need to prioritize and focus on opportunities that are the easiest to control and change, the possible risks and potential disruption asso- ciated with change (remembering if it ain't broke, don't fi x it), the cost and complexity of change, and the magnitude and certainty of poten- tial benefi t. Always consider changes that mitigate failure modes and maintenance costs. ese should direct attention to opportunities based on mission-critical machines and applications. The Most Bountiful Harvest Assessors and condition moni- toring analysts have one thing in common. ey both are looking for correctable faults that produce saves before they advance to failures and costly misses. By addressing issues at the assessor level (from periodic assessments), you have far fewer faults hidden in your machines to fi nd later at the condition moni- toring level by analysts (vibration, oil analysis, acoustics, etc.). In other words, you don't have to detect what doesn't exist. Assessments are designed to search for faults and issues of all types — specif ic, general and programmatic. Assessment types vary depending on the intended purpose or objective. At a more granular level, these might relate to skills, workforce, tools, methods, maintenance periodicity, lubricants, inspection, storage and handling, machine modifi cations, and condi- tion monitoring. Holistically, an assessment should examine commu- nications, documentation a nd records, data management, work management, asset management, 38% of lubrication professionals use a third party to assess the state of their machines and reliability program, based on a recent poll at MachineryLubrication.com