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.

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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.

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