In too many facilities, the maintenance effort is a hodgepodge of activity rather than a programmatic effort to reduce downtime.
A cohesive program is one designed with the whole in mind. If only half of your feeder cables are on an insulation resistance testing program, is that cohesive? It means half of the cables can be characterized as “unplanned downtime time bombs.” It almost doesn’t make sense to bother testing the other half, because you will have cable failures in the untested half.
But suppose resources are really tight and you allocate cable testing resources to the “critical” feeder cables. Critical equipment can still run safely if the cables that aren’t on the program fail, so this program is cohesive (though not optimally so).
Another way your program is cohesive is when you’ve determined all of the likely failure modes for a given set of equipment and designed a maintenance program around those modes. This would include predictive technologies (for some failure modes) and preventive action.
Your program is effective only when predictive measures are used properly (e.g., you actually trend those insulation resistance test readings) and preventive measures are performed correctly. You help prevent motor bearing failures by correctly changing the grease, but using incompatible greases guarantees bearing failure.
