Has this ever happened to your maintenance or reliability group??You have a good team of engaged employees who tackle new projects and challenges with ease.?They implement continuous improvement initiatives, stay on top of proactive condition monitoring actions, all while keeping up with the daily grind.?Suddenly, one team member takes a job elsewhere and another is transferred to a different department.?Now what??How do you maintain the momentum with reduced staff or a group of less experienced staff??
In terms of your oil analysis program, there are ways to lean on Fluid Life for extra support while you deal with periods of personnel transition.?
Don’t Lose Any Value with Reduced Staff
To make sure you continue to get value out of your oil analysis program, you want to focus on two major aspects.
- Sampling Compliance: Testing oil samples from your machinery is often a part of an OEMs’ warranty requirements to validate warranty claims if something goes wrong. Even when not in warranty, you need to ensure the company gets the most from its machinery investment and keep your equipment running efficiently. Try not to let sample volumes fall off by missed and/or partially completed PMs.?Samples need to go out for results that support your maintenance programs to come in.??
- Review of New Results: New results require review as quickly as possible on a routine basis, so a backlog isn’t created.?Leaving new results in the queue for too long might cause your team to miss impending failures and corrective actions to improve the overall health of your equipment.
How Can Fluid Life Help?
What you need the most right now is coverage.?Someone to monitor sampling compliance and ensure that new results are being looked at in a timely manner.?Fluid Life’s reliability department specializes in this type of service with our CARE program (Condition Assessment and Reliability Evaluation).
- Review of New Results and Corrective Action Generation: The primary focus of CARE is to have Fluid Life’s reliability and mechanical experts review your new results for you and provide prioritized corrective action recommendations when needed.?You no longer need to worry about reviewing new results, just stay on top of the new and active corrective actions.?These corrective actions can be communicated through the myLab platform as CARE alerts, or you can choose to integrate Fluid Life into your CMMS and have our reliability team create work notifications directly in your maintenance system.?We tailor CARE to suit your needs.?
- Equipment Health Status, Sampling Compliance and Other Program KPIs: Fluid Life will also manage your reporting and oil analysis program KPI needs as well.?With a depleted maintenance / reliability team, its still important to be able to show metrics of a successful oil analysis program.?
Get Your New Team Onboarded
Now that you have some new employees in place, it may be necessary to improve their knowledge of oil analysis to get them comfortable with the entire process (review results, decisions on corrective actions, generating and monitoring program KPIs, etc.).?
?How Can Fluid Life Help?
What you need the most right now is support (both technical and administrative) and training.?
- Fluid Life’s Team of Account Managers, Customer Care and Online Resources: To cover the basics of the overall oil analysis process (proper sampling, myLab utilization for sample registration and result review, and data interpretation and decision making), do not hesitate to contact your Fluid Life representatives to figure out the best way to get your new personnel onboarded.?Fluid Life can offer informal training, training materials, online guides, and more to get your new team members involved in oil analysis as quickly as possible.?
- Formal Lubrication and Reliability Training: Additional to the oil analysis onboarding training, you may also want to improve your staff knowledge of fundamental lubrication and reliability concepts.?For this, Fluid Life has a formal training department that specializes in both certification-based and non-certification-based training seminars.?
- CARE As a Consistent Partner: Some of our CARE Program customers continue the service after the coverage period is over.?With Fluid Life managing your new results and issuing corrective actions, your maintenance / reliability team are free to focus on other projects while still maintaining the expected value from your oil analysis program.?
It is important to remember that as a Fluid Life customer, you do not have to deal with personnel transition periods on your own.?Contact your Fluid Life representative to talk about CARE, formal training, oil analysis onboarding or your program in general.?
Originally posted on the Fluid Insights Blog October 5, 2022 by
Marc Pinkerton
