When Deferred Maintenance Makes Sense

The term “defer maintenance” typically equates to skipping scheduled maintenance or increasing the interval arbitrarily (versus from data) in an effort to “save money.” When you defer maintenance this way, you increase the rate of failure, the chance of business interruption, and the cost of repair. None of which are money-savers.

But sometimes, delaying scheduled maintenance is a good idea. Here are some examples:

• A plant-wide rolling shutdown is scheduled for the plant’s electrical testing firm to perform annual testing on the electrical infrastructure all the way down to, but not including, the branch circuit level. PMs that consist mostly of adjustment and tuning of several control systems happen to fall within this window. It is better to delay those PMs until after the electrical testing is completed.
• Similar shutdown situation, but the replacement of four motors and six transformers, due to their age, is slated for the week before. If doing so won’t cause crews to bump into each other, delaying this work until during the shutdown would eliminate some business interruption and be simpler to perform.
• Several thermographic inspections are scheduled for the second week of August, but that’s when Gary, the plant thermographer, has vacation scheduled. He’s off site for training the prior week. You could outsource this to a contractor, but Gary knows the equipment. A delay here makes sense.
• A switchgear cabinet is being replaced, along with all of its switchgear. It’s not a direct replacement. The new switchgear uses “smart breakers” and a couple of the sizes will change. And this new cabinet will have a thermographic window. Baseline testing will be conducted between installation and startup. Unless there is some reason to get maintenance data on the old breakers, it makes no sense to perform the PM work that is scheduled a month prior to the replacement.
• Two experienced maintenance techs have left the company in the past six months and have not been replaced. There simply are not enough qualified people to perform all of the maintenance plus respond to trouble calls. A short-term solution is to defer maintenance scheduled for the less critical equipment (as defined by Production) until such time as the Plant Engineer can bring in a contractor to take care of it. Alternatively, a contractor with specialized skills can be brought in to absorb some of the load in specific areas; for example, you don’t have a strong motor drives guy but they do.

Simple deferment as if the equipment will somehow take care of itself is always a gamble. The thing with gambling is the house wins far more often than the gambler does.

Here’s an example from a plant located about half an hour from Jackson, Tenn. They had a chilled water system that was piped all over one production building to cool critical equipment that was located among hot processes such as aluminum pots (these pots were typically kept at 1,280°F).

The Plant Manager wanted his numbers to really shine for the quarter, so (among other things) he ordered the Plant Controller to set the spending limit on the Maintenance Department’s credit card to zero. The only charge on that card in several months had been for the antifungal used in the chilled water system, a batch was bought every three to four weeks.

An hourly employee was in charge of adding the antifungal to the chilled water system twice per week. To his surprise and embarrassment, his card was declined when he tried to buy the next supply of antifungal at the local supply center. He didn’t tell his supervisor, figuring his supervisor must have already known (he did not). So the antifungal supply ran out.

It did not take long for algae to undergo explosive growth inside those warm water pipes, choking them off. The first sign that something was wrong? A rash of equipment failures. The Plant Manager’s blind effort to spare a $25 monthly expense resulted in a $17,000 repair job to the chilled water system, many hours of lost production, and over $60,000 in equipment damage.

Some maintenance absolutely cannot be deferred, regardless of other issues.