Simple steps to drive better Lubrication Practices

Hello, I'm Jeff Shiver, Managing Principal of People and Processes. Today I want to offer you a tip regarding lubrication practices.

Some studies have shown that 60% to 70% of fires are induced by improper lubrication practices. Correcting your lubrication practices is one of the quickest ways that you can drive and increase your reliability within your organization. That said; How do you start?

What you may consider is doing a vendor survey and that's whoever your lube distributor is. Have it be Chevron or Mobile or whoever. Have them come in and do a walk around the plant and do a survey of the lubricants you're using. That will actually help you with regard to your lubricant selection as well. Perhaps you can minimize the number of greases, or maybe you're still using a grease that's now inferior and could be replaced by a much better, much higher quality synthetic that will give you a longer time between changes or things like that.

Typically many times vendors will do that for you for free. Ask them to come in and set it up and do that. As part of that, they can also help you with your storage and handling and your contamination control. How do you actually store your lubricants? How do you make sure that you've got them where you're using the humidifiers or desk ends, as an example?

Another quick win is filtration and color coding. How do you make sure that you're not putting the wrong greases in the wrong places? One way, especially for people like operators or people like that doing the actual lubrication themselves, is to color code your grease guns. Or maybe you color code, put tags on your gearboxes and stuff like that, and you do the same thing with your storage containers.

This is just a very quick summary but think about how you can improve your lubrication practices, which is one of the quickest ways to improve your overall equipment reliability. Hope you enjoyed the tip. I'm Jeff Shiver, managing principal of People and Processes. Have a great day.