Having spent nearly my entire career in the field of lubrication, I’ve become increasingly aware that for many companies, the practice of neglecting lubrication has become deeply engrained in maintenance culture.

For these companies, changing such practices is like trying to turn an ocean liner. I’ve become convinced that their complacency is not simply a case of ignorance, but rather follows a pattern strangely similar to addiction.

After all, I’ve taught the virtues of modern lubrication to legends of organizations, only to see many of them quickly and irrationally relapse into their past destructive habits. This typifies addictive behavior.

These observations were the impetus for the topic of this column. In keeping with the addiction theme, I’ve modeled a plan for recovery using words and concepts resembling the highly successful 12-step program that serves as the cornerstone of recovery for the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) organization. After all, if lubrication neglect is an addiction then perhaps it should be treated in similar fashion in a program of 12 steps.

For companies afflicted with this addiction, casual intervention may not simply be enough. Instead, an ultimatum must be declared. Otherwise, past practices and bad habits will gradually return. Like other addictions, denial is the heart of neglect. The 12-step program discussed below brings the denial issue front-and-center. Until denial is acknowledged and addressed, no other progress can logically be made.

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Indeed it’s hard to justify spending time and money on things that aren’t yet broken when your maintenance staff is hog-tied, fixing the things that have broken. When breakdowns occur… well, you know the drill… not much else gets done until things are up and running again.

Let’s face it, breakdown maintenance is just plain unruly. It’s defiant, won’t conform to a schedule, and belies the budget. Breakdown maintenance is destructive and wasteful. It highjacks precious manpower and robs resource-limited organizations of operating capital. And worst of all, it has an obscene sense of timing.

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The field of maintenance technology is going through a revolution of change. Gone are the days when a machine had a predictable service life, after which it was replaced, continuing the cycle. Today machinery and equipment can be maintained to achieve useful operating lives many times that attainable just a few years ago. It is no longer a truism that all machines are built to fail. Why? Because there is an increasing understanding of the causes of failure, and, armed with this information, it is possible to prevent the initiation of failure proactively. The field of proactive maintenance targets this very objective.

When maintenance is performed in response to failure it is called breakdown maintenance. When maintenance is performed according to a schedule it is called preventive maintenance. When maintenance is performed in response to a detected impending failure it is called predictive maintenance. When maintenance is performed in response to detected conditions that avoid the onset of failure (by correcting the conditions) it is called proactive maintenance.

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