I was new to the factory. The day I showed up I found out the plant was in danger of being closed. Division published a plan for "plant consolidation"... and we were the bottom performer. They didn't mention that in the interview. My department had four maintenance techs. One on each shift. 24/7 coverage. And they were good. They knew their trades. We always had someone there for emergencies, but we never had enough people there to compete with emergencies. Every schedul

A core function approach to eliminating maintenance reactivity. Walk into almost any industrial facility and ask the maintenance manager how things are going. You will hear some version of the same answer: "We're getting killed and everyone is mad at us.”
 It's typically not a laziness or staffing problem. It's usually an organizational issue and sometimes a matter of technical knowledge. But it's fixable.
 Running maintenance is like driving through a forest. It's easier

Hiring a maintenance planner can set a maintenance shop back. I see it too often. As soon as a planner is hired, techs stop making parts lists. Because that's planning, and they want support. Techs are overworked. They want a planner so they can stop doing paperwork and get back to the floor. That's how it should be... right? Nope. If you're doing it that way, you're better off without the planner. Making parts lists... that's not a planner. That's a very expensive assista

Let's play a game for all the maintenance players! You get a call on a 240V fan motor that keeps throwing its overload. You do your homework. You pull out your meter and check the resistance across all three winding sets - balanced. You check winding to ground - no short. The motor runs. It just trips. Over and over. So what's going on? First: check your mechanical load before you go electrical. Spin the fan by hand with the motor de-energized. It should turn freely with min

Lets play a game for all the maintenance players! Suppose you're called to a case sealer that's gluing and closing the flaps on a corrugated case. You arrive and 1 box in four has flaps that are opening as it comes out of compression. Every open flap you look at has glue on both contact points of the open flap. What are the next things you should check? What common causes are there? Now here's where most techs get it wrong: Start with case dimensions coming out of the former.

Suppose you have a safety circuit on a machine that won't reset, no matter what you do. After checking all the doors, you go open the cabinet and see that the safety relay is showing "channel 1 light is on" and "channel 2 light" is off. What happened, what am I looking for, how do I need to proceed? Answer: One channel light on and one channel light off is an input fault on a safety relay. The relay is detecting a fault because the two channels didn't make simultaneously. D

Suppose you have a conveyor shut down while you're trying to run and you open the cabinet and see "DC Bus Overvoltage" fault on a VFD. What could you do about that? What could be the cause? Answer: Something is causing that motor to overrun the speed the VFD is driving it. When the lug inside the motor spins faster than the magnetic field, it increases voltage to the DC Bus and you get this relatively common fault. Most of the time, the cause is one of these 2 things: Motor

Suppose you have an industrial machine that's stopping with no indication of why and no fault. Power is consistent, it just stops now and then. What is the most probable single cause? Answer: It's probably a bad contact (loose wire or in a relay) in the run circuit. The run circuit of a machine is typically a "latching circuit" that indicates to the machine that the operator is telling the machine to run when it's "high" and that the operator wants the machine to stop when

You have a standard DC brush motor on a DC speed control driving a production conveyor. One day, the operator tells you, "The motor is running at full speed and I can't turn it down." What's the most likely single cause and how could it have been prevented? Drop your answer in the comments before scrolling. Answer: Brush dust buildup shorting the negative brush to ground. Carbon brush dust is conductive. As it accumulates on a brush grommet, it can create a short to ground.

Suppose you look at weekly passdowns, and one of your plastic articulated conveyors has broken the chain multiple times in the last week. You have lots of these conveyors, but this one is breaking and getting repaired repeatedly. They're all about the same age. This one isn't all that different from the others. It does start and stop under load, but they all do. You go look at it and everything you can see while it's running seems fine. No jumping or bad mechanical components

A tripped thermal overload is one of those events that is an opportunity to avoid unnecessary downtime and repeat calls that not every shop understands. Some techs reset overloads over and over until something breaks. Wiser techs just take a couple extra minutes to find the problem and they touch it once. The difference is sequence and understanding. Here's an approach that starts where you already are and rules out causes efficiently. What could have caused it? Before you do

In the world of asset management, deferred maintenance seems like a quick win, a way to cut costs today and free up budget for other priorities. Maintenance costs are deferred for several reasons. It could be because the organization cannot find the time for shutdown, doesn't plan well enough to get the work done, or just won't spend the money. But here's the harsh reality, what looks like savings upfront inevitably spirals into massive financial losses down the line. It's a

Is the classic CIL (Clean, Inspect, Lubricate) model of preventive maintenance missing a crucial piece? Yes, and it's a critical piece that the maintenance industry never discusses but we need to. Don't get me wrong, CIL is foundational in making components last longer. But without efficiently fixing identified issues before they spiral, the damaged and worn items on your machine will accelerate failures no matter how much grease you apply. Deferred maintenance leaves your as

Even well-laid plans can go awry in unexpected ways. Murphy's Law: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." This critical concept dominates the "operational level" of work in any organization. Every day, as the leader, you get a report of everything that went wrong yesterday. It's your job to build systemic countermeasures to make sure whatever went wrong yesterday cannot go wrong again. Murphy's Law reminds us that our approach to process and adherence involves building a