Many facilities and enterprises have failed to achieve the 10:1, 20:1 or even 30:1 return on investment (ROI) often promised with the introduction of a predictive maintenance (PdM) program.
Companies make investments in monitoring equipment and training only for data analyzers to collect dust on a shelf in some storeroom years later. Meanwhile, on the factory floor, it is back to business as usual with unplanned outages as the norm, since everyone is too busy fighting fires to get a handle on the situation.
This article will focus primarily on the personnel aspects of how a PdM program could potentially fail.
Retention
Retention of highly trained personnel is a problem that many companies struggle with. Many trained specialists are retiring, and others are either promoted or making lateral moves to other companies. The impact of these departures is especially devastating when individuals do not formalize their work into processes and procedures that other people can be trained to follow when they leave. The loss of the resident expert is often enough to doom a PdM program and banish its high tech equipment to the unreachable parts of the highest shelves.
The lesson here is that you should catalog work procedures and processes before personnel retire or change jobs. Formalizing procedures is one of the best steps you can take to not only enhance the effectiveness of your program, but also to institutionalize it. That way, the program becomes bigger than one person, or even a handful of people. It can then survive the loss of key personnel.
Training
Bringing in new PdM expertise takes time. How long does it take for someone to master the technology and effectively manage a program? A year? Two? Five? The answer depends not just on an employee’s skill level and past experience but also on whether they have the time, training, and resources to succeed.
Too often, PdM responsibilities are treated as an add-on rather than a full-time role. If the person expected to lead the program is also juggling daily maintenance tasks and emergency repairs, PdM will always take a back seat. Without proper support, even the best technology won’t prevent the program from stalling.
A facility that runs without an effective PdM program operates in constant firefighting mode. Equipment failures are unpredictable, and maintenance teams spend their time reacting instead of planning. Breaking this cycle requires more than just new tools — it requires a shift in mindset. That starts with giving PdM the priority it deserves.
Basic Direction
This leads us to the next potential problem, which is that this person or people heading the PdM program may not actually have the expertise needed to help the plant implement high quality PdM practices. Even if we assume the plant is ready to offer time and resources to support the PdM program, they still need someone in place who knows how to move forward.
A lack of technical skills and vision is a thorn in the side of many in-house PdM programs. Establishing predictive maintenance requires a good deal of contextual knowledge that helps engineers make the right choices about the appropriate technology to use within a myriad of variables — industries, sites, processes, and circumstances, both environmental and technological. Gathering data correctly is only the first, and many might argue the easiest, step. Correctly analyzing the data is at least equally as important, and deciding the proper actions to take from looking at the data requires a good deal of practice and experience.
Often, PdM managers spend too much time looking at vibration spectra and not enough time assessing the PdM program as a whole. But this is not necessarily the fault of the person or people chosen to do this work. Rather, it is simply a failure to realize the level of expertise in these matters that exists in the marketplace compared to the level of expertise we may be able to develop in-house — especially when companies keep losing their experts.
So, the bottom line here is that it is essential to provide adequate training and time for personnel to gain the knowledge and experience required to run an effective in-house PdM program. It can be done and can be done well. However, if companies aren’t willing or able to provide the time and resources to develop this expertise in-house, they should consider building an in-house program.
Strategic Direction
One last item worth mentioning is the problem of abrupt changes in strategic direction. Sometimes, successful programs are uprooted by managers who, when initially hired, appear on the scene with no knowledge of PdM and do one of two things. They either fire the staff responsible for these tasks or they don’t give the staff the time or permission to continue working on their programs.
However, this problem is more common in circumstances where the people running the PdM program have not adequately documented the efficacy of their work (i.e. they do not have the evidence handy to make a case for why the plant is better off keeping these programs in place). That’s another reason why it’s so important for staff to keep a written record of their procedures and results — it future-proofs the PdM program for years to come.
Trends
In recent years, there’s been a shift in the PdM industry towards outsourcing PdM activities to companies that have a long track record of successfully managing these sorts of programs. These companies also sustain the technical expertise to solve difficult problems, which isn’t always cheap or easy to find for an in-house program. We described some of the reasons for this shift above — namely, the difficulty a facility can have in hiring, training, and retaining individuals who have the depth of experience needed to turn PdM programs into real results and real money. Even those facilities that have seen substantial gains in evolving their maintenance efforts from reactive maintenance to PdM may abruptly devolve back into firefighter maintenance mode with the loss of a key expert or organizational shift.
One solution to these common problems is to team up with a well-established service provider who takes on the responsibility of keeping the program consistent year after year. A quality strategic partner like Azima DLI will have the necessary expertise, not only with the PdM technologies, but also in knowing how to strategically deploy them so that they positively affect the company’s bottom line.
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Author bio: Alan Friedman is a senior technical advisor for Azima DLI. With more than 18 years of engineering experience, Friedman has worked with hundreds of industrial facilities worldwide and developed proven best practices for sustainable condition monitoring and predictive maintenance programs. He has also produced and taught global CAT II and CAT III equivalent vibration analysis courses.