August 29, 2005
The Cost of Maintenance 4
The Impact of Missed Calls
Vice President, Electrical Reliability Group
T-Solutions, Inc.
http://www.tsoln-inc.com
The Impact of Missed Calls
Another area of concern, as related to CBM technology, is the missed call. This is when the technician makes a call based upon training, experience, software and/or other input. These are of greatest danger to a program when the call is made on equipment that is of either production impact, or of high profile, that is incorrect.
There is a general rule, primarily known in the sales and marketing industry, that for every 20 good things, one bad wipes them out. So, while a program can be highly successful, with great savings and uptime, one bad call can bring the whole program into question.
One of the primary reasons is that many people use the term Predictive Maintenance, when discussing technology. This gives others the impression that the technology is good enough to ‘predict’ failure, possibly even predict when the failure will occur. This ends up putting an unrealistic expectation on the technology(s) involved in evaluating the equipment in question.
One of the methods used to avoid this misconception is by identifying the technologies as ‘condition-based monitoring’ (CBM) technologies. [Note: CBM is not just related to technology, but any method of being able to compare existing condition to some standard] The technology results can then be presented as measurements identifying reduced equipment reliability.
However, we will cover this in more depth later.
