Machinery Lubrication magazine published by Noria Corporation
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1470959
AS I SEE IT Seven Levels Of Lubrication Excellence Survival • Crisis and breakdown maintenance. • High management turnover. • Pretending to save money by not investing in reliability. • Entrenched old-school or business-as-usual practices. Challenges from management; ignorance and denial. Unconscious incompetence. Archaic tribal skills. Mayhem and defensive maintenance culture. Suffering from false economy of buying "lowest bidder" lubricants. Failure to provide the tools and facilities to protect lubricants during storage and handling. Suffering from false economy of buying machines stripped of needed lubrication-related and inspection hardware. No retrofits to remedy inadequate lubrication, contamina- tion control, sampling or inspection devices. Lack of failure-mode condition monitoring tasks. Outdated task methods, tasks performed poorly and/or tasks performed infrequently. No management metrics related to lubrication or condition monitoring. Independent assessment of machine inspection, oil analysis and related condition monitoring practices benchmarked to the optimum reference state. Gap analysis. Opportunities found. Assessment of manage- ment metrics needs. Re-engineering of inspection and oil analysis program. Integration with broader condition-based maintenance strategy (proactive and predictive maintenance). Basic initial deployment. Design and roll-out of improved, tactical lubrica- tion-related metrics/KPI's. Early-stage management awareness of need to educate workforce. Lubrication fundamentals training of trades. Conscious incompe- tence. Knowledge and skills assessment completed. Gap analysis performed. Growing awareness of opportunities. Independent assessment of current lubricants, proce- dures, tools and storage facilities. Benchmarked to best practice and the optimum reference state. Opportunities found. Independent assessment of current machine state bench- marked to the optimum reference state. Opportunities found. Review of engineering specification for hardware needed for new or rebuilt machines. Planning for needed machine modifications. Purchase and installation of machine modification hardware to enable lubrica- tion contamination control, sampling and inspection improvements. Examination of lubes in use (machine-specific) and current supplier relations. Initial acquisition of best practice lube tools. Development and initial deployment of improved and documented lube procedures, PMs and runtime tasks. Improvement of critical machine lube selection. Basic task-based training of operators, millwrights and trades that followed competency assessments. Awareness • Basic management awareness. • Conscious incompetence. • Success case study awareness. • Planning for change. • Looking for low-hanging fruit. Crawling • Low-budget, low-risk changes are imple- mented. • Focus on low-hanging fruit. • Pilot programs. • Bad actor and mission critical first. 4 | May - June 2022 | www . machinerylubrication.com