Tip of the Week: Properly Allocate Your Motor Maintenance Resources
You know it’s important to properly allocate motor maintenance resources. And you know this doesn’t necessarily mean working on the most frequent motor failure causes, because those causes may not have the most dollar impact. So how can you determine the proper allocation for your plant?
A good way to do this is to go to the failure cause data, and create a spreadsheet that shows the number of failures per cause type (e.g., winding failure) and the cost in revenue per failure per cause type. Then make a bar chart that sorts by total cost per failure type. Sort from largest to smallest so the bars appear from tallest to shortest, left to right. You want to focus resources on eliminating the root causes of the tallest bars on the chart. If the distribution is normal, you will have a visual representation of the Pareto principle. That is, 80% of the lost revenue is due to 20% of the motor failures.
If you don’t have this representation, maybe you have bad data or are categorizing failures incorrectly. Even so, you can now see the relative dollar impact of failure causes and where to allocate motor maintenance resources. Update this quarterly, and change allocation as needed; just don’t un-allocate from what’s working.
About the Author
Mark Lamendola
Mark is an expert in maintenance management, having racked up an impressive track record during his time working in the field. He also has extensive knowledge of, and practical expertise with, the National Electrical Code (NEC). Through his consulting business, he provides articles and training materials on electrical topics, specializing in making difficult subjects easy to understand and focusing on the practical aspects of electrical work.
Prior to starting his own business, Mark served as the Technical Editor on EC&M for six years, worked three years in nuclear maintenance, six years as a contract project engineer/project manager, three years as a systems engineer, and three years in plant maintenance management.
Mark earned an AAS degree from Rock Valley College, a BSEET from Columbia Pacific University, and an MBA from Lake Erie College. He’s also completed several related certifications over the years and even was formerly licensed as a Master Electrician. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and past Chairman of the Kansas City Chapters of both the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society. Mark also served as the program director for, a board member of, and webmaster of, the Midwest Chapter of the 7x24 Exchange. He has also held memberships with the following organizations: NETA, NFPA, International Association of Webmasters, and Institute of Certified Professional Managers.