Live from PdM-2005 - Tuesday

Tuesday was a day packed with high quality presentations at PdM 2005.  Highlights of the day’s sessions included presentation topics like ‘Managing a Successful Condition Based Monitoring Program”, “The Value of Implementing Reliability Based Maintenance Practices”, a case study - “Using Predictive Technologies to Improve Equipment Reliaibility at Duracell” and “Oil Analysis - A Short Course”.

Some sessions provided a solid introduction for people seeking basic information on what benefits predictive technology and condition based monitoring can provide.  Other sessions went deeper into the subjects so more experienced professionals in the field had a quality learning experience.

The keynote speaker was John Schultz, CMRP from Allied Services Group.  He had the room buzzing with energy as he fired off reason after reason how improving maintenance practices can increase the bottom lines of virtually any company.  His mantra is “It’s OK to get excited about maintenance.” He went through a ton of examples (some of them quite comical) of companies that thought they were doing a great job in maintenance.  After looking into their practices a little deeper, he found they weren’t doing as good of a job as they thought. 

The thing I took away from John’s keynote was that almost all organizations consider themselves starved for resources.  Many feel that maintenance is an area where they can avoid contributing additional resources.  However, as maintenance professionals learn to speak in economic terms, and can document with hard numbers a Return on Investment from maintenance spending, then it becomes much easier to justify requests for additional maintenance spending.  But it is useless to spend more on maintenance unless you spend it on the right type of maintenance.

There are plenty of studies that have been completed that clearly show using predictive technologies correctly and moving a majority of your maintenance workflow from time-based to condition-based can lower your maintenance spending considerably.  So it’s the right thing to do for organizations.  As maintenance professionals, it is our job to find a way to put the additional up-front cost of starting or improving a condition based maintenance program into a context that shows it will generate a considerable return on investment.

Look for articles in the coming months on how to do this in Uptime Magazine.  If you would like to subscribe please follow this link, and remember, it is a free subscription.  Uptime Magazine
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Jeff Shuler
Editor In Chief
Uptime Magazine