Maintain Your Equipment; Reduce Your Risk, Part 1 of 6
Dave Smith has been an Industrial Maintenance Electrician since 1975. He has taught maintenance, troubleshooting and safety courses to thousands of electricians in mines, mills, refineries, factories, plants, power stations and offshore platforms throughout North America and the Middle East. Dave is a hands-on guy and teache...
With the national adoption of CSA Z462, Workplace Electrical Safety, it is apparent that Canadian industry requires its own electrical maintenance standard. I am one of several dozen members of the volunteer technical committee developing CSA Z463, Guideline on Maintenance of Electrical Systems.
Everyone is aware of the dangers of electrocution and electrical fires. Not everyone is aware that electrical systems, like boilers, are subject to violent and catastrophic explosions resulting from maintenance failures. The only way to prevent these explosions, and the resulting injuries, is through regular testing and maintenance.
Worldwide, electrical maintenance failures have caused billions of dollars in losses. For example, in the late 1980s, an electrical maintenance failure forced a highly successful multi-national bottled water company to destroy $200-million worth of product worldwide, leading to the loss of over half its market share. Its total losses and ultimate corporate damage are estimated to be almost $4 billion.
In addition, a precedent has been set in Canadian law regarding lack of maintenance. A contractor was found guilty of criminal negligence causing death with respect to a workplace incident resulting in the death of his employee when the brakes on a backhoe failed. The court concluded that, in neglecting to perform proper maintenance, the accused “markedly departed from the standard of care expected of a prudent and diligent person”.
The great difficulty is determining the proper mixture and application of differing maintenance philosophies. In CSA Z463, we are addressing four: reactive maintenance (a.k.a. breakdown, corrective or run-to-failure); preventive maintenance (time-based); predictive maintenance (condition-based); and reliability-centred maintenance (function-based).
These maintenance philosophies come with differing costs, pros and cons. Reactive maintenance has the allure of being low cost as it requires fewer staff. Running equipment to failure and repairing or replacing when obvious problems occur is a valid maintenance approach with certain equipment but any savings can be completely wiped out with lost production and other costs. Research has proven that a reactive maintenance philosophy has a yearly cost of $18 per horsepower.
These costs can be reduced to $13/hp per year by adopting preventive maintenance activities i.e. oil changes after so many hours of operation (but catastrophic failures are still likely to occur).
A further evolution in maintenance management is the implementation of predictive maintenance. Companies that have mastered this process have enjoyed a reduction in operation cost to $9/hp per year, including a 10-fold return for every dollar invested in predictive maintenance, 25% to 30% reduction in maintenance costs, 70% to 75% elimination of breakdowns, 35% to 45% reduction in downtime and a 20% to 25% increase in production.
With the advent of wide-body jets in the late 1960s, airlines combined these three methods of maintenance into reliability-centred maintenance, a process where the appropriate method, or combination of methods, was employed in combination with root cause failure effect. When done correctly, this process reduces operating costs to $6/hp per year. This process is now standard throughout the airline and utility industries, but is slow to be adopted in other industries as it can have significant start up, training and other costs with the continuing savings not readily apparent to managers lacking extensive maintenance experience.
The production practice known as “lean manufacturing” originated with Toyota and enabled it to become the world’s largest automaker. A critical adjunct to this is total productive maintenance, which is a method for improved machine availability through better utilization of maintenance and production resources. Whereas in most production settings the operator is not viewed as a member of the maintenance team, the machine operator in TPM is trained to perform many of the daily tasks of simple maintenance and fault-finding.
Only by regular and proper maintenance of your electrical system can you reduce the safety, financial and legal risks to your organization.
Until next time, be ready, be careful and be safe.©