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justify PM; into the bathtub...


While not often discussed, Avid Andy has been known to have some serious flashbacks.  Hallucinogenic drugs from parties long ago or dropped one time too many times as a child, your guess is as good as mine.  Andy recalled the time, years ago when we just stopped performing maintenance on exhaust fans under "x" CFM.  Sure, reliability advances in the product, declining costs, were all contributors to us changing our maintenance routines.  Could it be time to once again re-assess our approaches, this time on unitary systems under "x" tonnage?  Do we have any idea how to even approach such a decision?  Certainly IIoT promises to give us more information in the future, once we have the data to model; however, might we reflect back on fundamental logic around MTFB (mean time between faults) and EOL (end of life) calculations.  My favorite visual is sketched as the image above, some liberties to the traditional "bath tub" theory were taken. 



Shown are three main columns, decreasing, constant, and increasing failure rates.  As you might imagine, everything runs great to start, and most of you reading this believe that when proper maintenance is performed we can minimize the issues during the "constant" failure rate time period.  To illustrate this point you can see the contrast of the green line (when proper PM is performed) and the red line (when little to no PM is performed).  The purple line represents failures seen at start-up or shortly thereafter, also known as infant mortality (don't shoot the messenger, this is really the term).   This chart, and the aforementioned explanation, is probably making all of the service companies happy, patting their backs saying "yep, I told you so".



Down deep inside, after nearly four decades in the service business, I really want to believe.  Unfortunately the missing point of data is cost or financial impact.  This post leaves me with more questions than answers; how long do I really want a unitary system to run, heck after 10 years the efficiency and control gains have been significant.  If I saved my money by performing minimalistic PM at the beginning, put that money in a contingency fund and paid for increased equipment failures, would I be money ahead?  Has the cost and reliability of say, a 5 ton package unit come down to the point where we should only be changing filters (isn't this what 90% of home owners are doing already?)?



These questions / reflections are healthy, you should be challenging yourselves on making sure that we are all focused squarely on maximizing customer value.  Always in business, and especially in these rapidly changing times, you must be excellent at pivoting.



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Next post:  from the field to the office

Thoughts?  feel free to leave replies or direct message

See all of the "last mile worker" posts here:  http://lastmileworkersolutions.com

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