Join Jeff Shiver CMRP of People and Processes as he discusses three separate types of Maintenance activities.

Transcript

Hello, I'm Jeff Shiver, Managing Principal of People and Processes.

Often times I get asked, "What are the different types of maintenance?" If we use your car as an analogy, let's start with the front tire. If we want to measure the wear on that tire, is that intrusive or non-intrusive? It's actually non-intrusive. We're simply doing an inspection, condition monitoring, measuring the wear.

If we take for example, changing the oil, is changing the oil intrusive or non-intrusive? We know it's intrusive because we introduce the opportunity for infant mortality, meaning that we could cross out the drain plug, we could not apply the filter correctly, we could even put the wrong type of fluid in there. That's intrusion.

We have the third one here which is detective. For detective we have to think about things that are not evident to the operator under normal circumstances. For example, how many of you actually check the air in your spare tire before you go on a long trip? Many times most of us fail to do that, but if we had a primary failure, meaning that we lost a tire, and we needed that spare tire and it was not functioning then we'd be dead in the water. The whole point is we want to actually go in and do detective work. Find things that have actually failed.

There's one other type of maintenance that I haven't listed here and that's actually no scheduled maintenance. That's an option as well. Take the irrigation system in the front yard. We're not going to check the sprinkler heads as an example. When the grass starts dying we know that we've got a problem. The risk doesn't outweigh the benefit of actually doing the inspections and stuff. No scheduled maintenance.

When we talk about non-intrusion as an example, what are we really talking about? What we're really talking about is an unconditioned task. Unconditioned task can be things like an operator looking at the output of a valve, or looking at the throughput from a flow meter, as an example, or simply looking to see if the belt is cracked or worn. Intrusive inspections, we need to think of those as scheduled restorations or scheduled discards.

If you think about this, really, these two types of maintenance are time based, where this is more condition monitoring. With detective maintenance, what we're really talking about is failure finding. We're looking for things that would not be evident to the operator under normal operating conditions. Failure finding is another type of task.

I hope these tips were beneficial to you today. I'm Jeff Shiver, Managing Principal of People and Processes. Have a great day.