Concerning A maintenance metric

Jim,

Brilliant as usual; I am certain that you are the only person who does this kind of stuff who has actually run a mill!!

Joe Broz
Washington State
USA

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Jim,

Thanks for a thoughtful article on maintenance. I think that back in the good old days, people didn't move around as much on their jobs so keeping things ship shape for the long haul was important. Now days with managers moving frequently, the attractiveness of shorter term profits may dilute the effort to work for longer term success. Just a theory. However, giving operators the tools to check equipment more accurately can reverse this. Tools like temperature probes, strobe lights, and vibration meters and a plan to use them. They find problems early thereby avoiding disastrous failures.

Riddle: St. Croix Country Club, Calais, Maine

Peace,
Gene Canavan
Prattville, Alabama
USA

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Gene:

Besides tools, you have to give them the budgets to fix things in advance that are going bad. I have seen many a mill with great diagnostic tools which highly trained people use after something breaks. Why? They operate on a philosophy of breakdown maintenance. Stupid.

What is really amazing is what lubrication and alignment can do. Many root cause failures are simply due to lubrication neglect, poor alignment and nothing else. You don’t need very fancy tools or analyses protocols to fix these.

Mr. Broz (see above) and I walked into a mill over twenty years ago that apparently had not owned a grease gun or an oil can in a very long time--and he put me in charge of maintenance! He slept fitfully while I spent my nights and weekends getting the place back in shape. That mill, on its deathbed at the time, lasted another twenty years (with the help of some other great managers, of course).

Jim

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