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Avoid the pain of equipment shutdowns |
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Written by Ed Sullivan
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To some people, maintenance is a necessary evil, a secondary activity that detracts from production and depletes capital. Paradoxically, this opinion has caused many companies to paint themselves into a corner, causing emergency downtime that's both exorbitant and avoidable.
"In many business sectors, maintenance is synonymous with pain," says Dan Schreiner of the North Central Group in Prince George, BC. "And they're right, equipment outages and forced downtime is painful, mostly because it's expensive and impacts production."
Schreiner knows that the pain can turn into downright resentment when companies end up paying maintenance contractors hefty overtime charges, compounded by the cost of production losses for emergency services and equipment replacement, which may very well have been avoidable.
"To a great extent, maintenance isn't a 'core' value of a company's business philosophy. Many maintenance-related decisions are long-term," says Schreiner. "And the reason that so many industrial operations are struggling with maintenance issues and forced downtime isn't because of decisions they made last week or last quarter—it's because of decisions they made three to five years ago."
In both Schreiner's and his partner, Peter Dawley's experience, performing maintenance in the "fire-fighting" mode is a primary reason for emergency shutdowns and the exorbitant repair or untimely replacement of equipment.
"Those who consider maintenance as an ancillary business function are headed for those problems," says Dawley. "A well-planned, ongoing maintenance program should be a core business activity, just like production or sales."
Established in 1965, North Central Group offers maintenance consulting, project management, constructability audits and field services to commercial and industrial customers in North America, plus a wide range of machining, engineering, machinery manufacturing, repair, overhaul, installation, construction and maintenance.
This is an edited article provided by North Central Group and Power PR. Ed Sullivan is a U.S.-based technology writer. For more information, visit www.ncmachineworks.com.
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