As oil analysis specialists, we had much to offer; and in the past 10 years, we’ve given hundreds of seminars and graduated thousands of students. However, we’ve also learned much from these students, especially details on the purpose for their hunger for knowledge in oil analysis.

For starters, we’re aware that people quickly accepted the logic that oil was the life blood of their machines. And, just like human medicine, they also understood that analyzing the oil equated to a pathological study of machine health and disease. We’ve all seen how human lives are spared when early alerts to threatening ailments are found, enabling corrective measures to be taken.

Since the early 1960s, oil analysis has been routinely applied to in-service lubricants of operating machinery. The field has benefited from many advances in technologies and procedures along the way. We’ve also learned that success seems to depend heavily on acquiring key skills. Imagine trying to perform the job of a pathologist without attending medical school.

The post Education and User Empowerment appeared first on Tesibis.

Modern organizations call it raising the corporate IQ. Most of us have seen statistics on the lifetime financial returns of a college education. When it comes to education, a penny saved is not a penny earned, but rather green dollars forfeited – hundreds of them, all for the quest of a penny.

When it comes to lubrication and oil analysis, the unskilled and untrained workforce is deceivingly costly. These are the costs that go undiagnosed and unrecognized. What’s below the water’s surface and out of management’s view often has iceberg-like proportions.

So why does an organization look to the maintenance payroll to make cuts in the name of survival and prosperity? For one, it’s conspicuous, like the iceberg’s tip. It is also indirect labor that is perceived as easier to sacrifice. Managers often take a Parkinson’s Law view of indirect labor, “the manpower it takes to do a job is directly proportional to the manpower available to do the job.”

The post The Hidden Cost of an Untrained Workforce appeared first on Tesibis.