Lubricant procurement is not the largest expenditure in a typical maintenance budget. However, it is viewed as a real, tangible expense that is frequently targeted for cost reduction. When it comes to lubricants, it is unwise to pretend to save money by “buying cheap.”

Lubricants are the lifeblood of your machinery. Your machines’ life expectancy depends largely on the quality and state of these lubricants to bathe heavily loaded frictional surfaces. This also goes for investing in quality technologies and tools used in your lubrication program (such as routing software or automated lubricators) to promote efficiency. Optimum reliability and lubrication must go hand in hand.

Now that you are aware of the perils of poor-quality lubricants and lubrication, let’s take a look at the many opportunities to reduce lubricant spending without compromising reliability. Start by writing a simple lubricant specification for each machine.

Don’t rely solely on the recommendations of the equipment supplier or service manual. Instead, be bold and challenge generic or generalized statements relating to viscosity and lubricant formulation.

Once again, there is a need for caution. I’m not suggesting willy-nilly lubricant changes in an effort to enhance reliability by trial and error. There is always risk associated with changing lubricants. Smart practices, though, can quickly overcome these dangers. Risk should be respected but not feared.

The lubricant specification should be aligned with the optimum reference state for machine reliability. In constructing this specification, you should understand machine failure modes and overall machine criticality as a foundation to defining a machine’s precise lubricant needs.

There is a vast number of lubricant types available from both major and independent suppliers. Navigating the maze of options can be daunting but often very worth the effort. Find help if needed.

Reducing lubricant spending requires change and initiative. For many organizations, the low-hanging fruit is obvious. Below are five effective strategies for reducing your annual lubricant spending.

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Machines fail for a reason. They’re not supposed to wear out. Humans are at the root of the vast majority of these failures. It’s also humans that can intervene and restore plants to healthy and sustained operation. This is not an imaginary concept but rather a living reality in a growing number of companies today.

Machine failure can deliver an important lesson on future prevention and remediation. Fortunately, there have been countless investigations into failure causes across wide-ranging machine types and applications. This learning has enabled organizations to greatly enhance reliability but only when machine and programmatic modifications were applied. Lubrication and reliability training programs are designed to teach this collective knowledge about failure prevention. Still, knowing is not the same thing as doing.

The post The Business Case for Lubrication Excellence appeared first on Tesibis.

For most organizations, the opportunities for a substantial financial win from lubrication excellence are enormous with lots of low-hanging fruit. The most common financial benefit is reduced downtime by averting high-downtime machine failures. This strategy reveals the “hidden plant” and deploys proactive maintenance (root cause elimination) and predictive maintenance (early fault detection). And, sometimes you need a crisis to focus on reliability.

The problem with the hidden plant is that it requires spending dollars today to mitigate or prevent a future failure event. Yes, a dollar invested today may return $100 dollars or more in the future, but how long must one wait for the return? How certain are you that such an averted failure would have occurred?

For example, if you apply enhanced contamination control to just one machine, say a diesel engine, you might not see a benefit of an extended overhaul interval for more than a couple years. Conversely, if you have a fleet of diesel engines, the total number of overhauls (and lost production) might be reduced by 50 percent in any given time period including the current year.

Still, there are other tangible financial benefits that don’t relate to averted future failures. How can the cost of implementing a world-class lubrication program be paid for in today’s budgetary cycle? This is the theme of this article. Also, see Joe Anderson’s “How to Show the Value of a Lubrication Program” article.

The post Five Ways to Monetize Lubrication Excellence Now appeared first on Tesibis.

Changing maintenance from reactive to planned activities is the goal of most compa-nies depending on safe and reliable machinery operation. However, successful change management demands a workable plan. The best plan is one with an eye for what lies ahead – a program that can pinpoint precise maintenance needs. The strategy is sometimes referred to as precision maintenance.

This is where oil analysis comes into play. When properly implemented, oil analysis can forecast maintenance needs before conventional maintenance scheduling. For example, oil analysis can assist outage (shutdown) management to efficiently direct maintenance resources where there is genuine need.

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