Unless you’re analyzing motor failure causes and planning your maintenance accordingly, your motor maintenance program isn’t optimally allocating resources to motor failure prevention. When upper management sees the maintenance budget and also sees many production interruptions because of motor failures, what conclusions can they draw? Probably none that are healthy for your long-term employment prospects in that company.
Often, maintenance is designed around perceptions and myths rather than the reality of hard data. Worse, excuses are made to avoid taking blame and making the necessary changes. Here’s an example of this situation.
Typically, the motors in a given area are of the same brand. When they start failing, it’s nearly always because of maintenance deficiencies. But how convenient that they are the same brand! Instead of solving the problem, you can blame that particular manufacturer.
Yet, it’s simply not true that an established brand has been getting by for decades with producing junk and your failure rates would be hugely different if only the idiot specifier who bought these had picked a different brand.
What makes failure rates hugely different isn’t the brand. It’s essential that you have the right motor for the application and that it’s properly installed. But after that, the difference arises because of how well maintenance is correlated to, and planned against, the known failure causes. In other words, work from your data.
