In many facilities, repair is thought of as a one-off activity in which the technician pits his skill against a unique problem. That facility may have maintenance procedures, but because the details of a repair vary depending upon the failure mode it doesn’t have repair procedures.
Typically, repairs take place under heightened pressure. Shortcuts get taken. Perhaps, for example, the technician doesn’t isolate all energy sources or use a meter to verify de-energization after locking out the breaker.
It’s bad when someone is injured, but adding to the situation is the fact that person is injured when he is needed most.
The solution is to create repair procedures. But wait, how can you have a procedure when you don’t know what the repair tech is going to do? One way around this is to create three types of procedures:
- A generic procedure for that particular equipment; you can “steal” this part from your existing preventive maintenance (PM) procedures. The main function of this procedure is to create a safe condition for working on that equipment.
- A troubleshooting procedure.
- A set of “how to” procedures, each one being problem-specific. The tech merely needs to select the one(s) indicated by the troubleshooting procedure.