Preventive Maintenance in Hard Times
Preventive maintenance is never easy to budget for — in time or money. We’re always too busy fixing broken equipment that we never get around to doing the preventive maintenance which, of course, eventually results in even more broken equipment. Stopping this cycle is difficult in the best of times but clearly a much greater challenge today. These may not be the worst of times, but I can’t think of any worse times for aviation in my lifetime.
But we need to break this cycle, if for no other reason than it really costs more in the end. Tightening the fan belt today could keep it from breaking and having to be replaced tomorrow. We all know this but that doesn’t make it any easier when we’re just trying to make it from day-to-day. I know, you’re thinking who’s going to tell the ramp sup his critical piece of equipment isn’t available because of some PM check? But you miss this PM check and then you miss the next one and pretty soon, you have a broken piece of equipment to contend with. Not a good scenario.
Back when I was responsible for ground equipment, I got caught in that same cycle of putting off preventive maintenance for one reason or another and then ending up with broken and unusable equipment. We finally decided that we had to bite the bullet and stop this cycle, because it was costing us more time and money in the end.
So we decided that we would give the ramp sup a schedule of PM items and tell him he needed to do what it took to temporarily replace that equipment — rent, borrow or steal (OK, not steal) — because the checks needed to get done. And we were going to stick to our plan no matter what. It wasn’t easy, but after a few months we noticed a difference in the number of breakdowns.
We all know this but we’re pushed by the constant pressure to keep things moving. I know it’s tough to “just say no,” as a former first lady used to say, but sometimes we really do just have to pause and do the right thing for the long term.
June 4th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
old school says to pm your units , (you and me) but now LEAN says to draw out the pm times longer and longer , some of the bean counters believe that the cost of the pm reduces value and lowers ROI (return on investment)…total the cost of the pm ,the cost of lost production(unit out of service)vs the breakdown…. by triming pm’s whose cost is predicable vs a break down that may or may not happen (not predictable) … see maintenance technology view point may 2009 issue .. back page .. ben stevens OMDEC inc ” from ram to roi” for interesting view point
June 13th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Could you tell me why some of our equipment takes 13 plug ins and other 7 plug ins to equalize? Also why does it take smaller pieces of equipment 8+ hours to equalize while it takes other larger equipment 4+ hours to equalize? Is either of these indicative of low battery cells.