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to this if the overtime rates negotiated are to
some people’s advantage.
It is also worth noting that failures to plant
that have not been planned can also have a
Health and Safety implication, as injuries
to personnel may indeed occur due to the
type and extent of the failure itself. This is
obviously not good for the person suffering
an injury but equally does no favours for the
credibility of either individual plant managers or the company itself.
It would seem that a crystal ball would be
distinctly useful in providing the information
necessary, as the plant is running, to be able to
plan maintenance effectively and efficiently
thereby removing all of the pitfalls mentioned
above which result from unexpected plant
failures.
Condition monitoring techniques, applied
correctly, can provide the manufacturing
industry with that crystal ball, and assist
greatly in switching the emphasis from
Reactive Maintenance, or Run To Failure
Maintenance, to Predictive Maintenance.
Ultimately, a Pro-Active Maintenance strategy will hopefully ensue whereby knowledge
gained from efficient condition monitoring
techniques can identify the root causes of
historical failure in any items of plant, or its
components, and engineer them out. This
technique is known as Root Cause Analysis.
By providing the manufacturing industry
with the correctly applied condition monitoring techniques, we have the ability to increase
plant efficiency and, more importantly, to
increase plant profitability. There is, of course,
the added bonus of potentially improving a
particular plant’s Health and Safety standing
and related credibility.
It cannot be stressed enough that plant
efficiency, and hence plant profitability, is not
only attributable to the operating efficiency
of individual items of the plant but of the
process as a whole, and condition monitoring techniques can be applied plant-wide to
ensure that the entire plant process is run
as efficiently as is practically possible. This
includes such ancillary services as the electrical supplies, compressed gases, vacuum
services, steam, liquids, and o \