Where are the savings?

Often, with limited resources, we are trying to find ways to convince management that a particular system will make a measurable gain in productivity. For example, implementing an equipment vibration monitoring system can save the company money in various ways:
Planning repairs around scheduled maintenance.
Limiting overtime for emergency repair
Limiting emergency shipment of replacement parts
Eliminating waste on restarts
Eliminating waste due to the original equipment failure

These gains, of course, must be balanced against the cost of inplementing the changes. For example, the cost of implementing the PdM stratedy above will include:
Buying vibration monitoring sensors
Installing cabling for the sensors
Training personnel to use the system
Analyzing the results

So why do nearly 80% of PdM implementations either fail outright or show very little savings? The Answer…A PdM strategy that does not include a proven root cause analysis technique will continue to have the same problems show up over and over again. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could:

Detect impending equipment failure
Determine why the failure is occuring
Schedule corrective maintenance on both the equipment and the root cause of the failure for completion during a scheduled maintenance period
Never see this same failure again

Using a PdM system to detect and correct failures is only half the answer. The final strategy MUST include correction of the underlying reason of the failures. This is where the TapRooT(R) Root Cause Analysis system and the Equifactor(R) Equipment Troubleshooting module, melded with an effective PdM technique, will quickly recover the unrealized savings.