There is  a great recent article Maximizing Your Equipment Life by Determining Failure Modes by Terry Harris, in which he discusses how machinery failures can be prevented and preventive care enhanced.

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He says, “I have been in a few textile and oilseeds plants where the fan guard on the motor is covered with product. This increases the temperature of the motor and windings and reduces the life of the winding component by 50 percent or more.”

He asks the following. “Why don’t we ask more questions when we have equipment failures? Here are a few of the reasons:

• Culture: We have created cultures in many plants that if the equipment components fail, make sure we have spares and get them changed as quickly as possible.
• Reactive: We do most of our repairs in a reactive state, so we must have parts and we must do the repairs quickly and without much precision in the work process.
• Training: There is a lack of training to teach people how components fail and, more importantly, how to keep them from failing. Programs such as root cause analysis (RCA) and Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) can be educational processes for critical plant equipment and lead to longer life cycles of the components.”

The issue is not just training, of which there is not enough, nor often enough. Many maintenance issues can be avoided with proper discussion of product impact prior to machine design and build. Everyone knows that salt is corrosive, but how many think about the corrosive impact of flying sugar? or of flour or crumbs building up and impeding air flow? At Package, we have  had to replace bearings and gears for customers because we were not told prior to delivery about how much sugar flew around the plant where our machine was installed.

• What have you learned after you took delivery of a machine that you would change if you could?
• What could have been done differently?
• What is your recommendation for training?
• Would preventive maintenance training help?

Please share your thoughts.